To check the prerequisites for Kaldi, first run extras/check_dependencies.sh and see if there are any system-level installations you need to do. Check the output carefully. There are some things that will make your life a lot easier if you fix them at this stage. If your system default C++ compiler is not supported, you can do the check with another compiler by setting the CXX environment variable, e.g. CXX=g++-4.8 extras/check_dependencies.sh Then run make which by default will install ATLAS headers, OpenFst, SCTK and sph2pipe. OpenFst requires a relatively recent C++ compiler with C++11 support, e.g. g++ >= 4.7, Apple clang >= 5.0 or LLVM clang >= 3.3. If your system default compiler does not have adequate support for C++11, you can specify a C++11 compliant compiler as a command argument, e.g. make CXX=g++-4.8 If you have multiple CPUs and want to speed things up, you can do a parallel build by supplying the "-j" option to make, e.g. to use 4 CPUs make -j 4 In extras/, there are also various scripts to install extra bits and pieces that are used by individual example scripts. If an example script needs you to run one of those scripts, it will tell you what to do.