Hello,
Thanks! Yes, you can always record your own WAV and submit it to the wav decode method – I’ve taken some care to try to make sure that that method keeps as much code in common with the rest of the implementation as possible so it can be used as a fallback or for testing. The downsides of the approach you’re speculating about are that you lose voice activity detection, and you will either have to code your own low-latency audio implementation, which will be subject to the same restraints as OpenEars’ low-latency audio implementation with regards to coexistence, or you will have a higher-latency implementation if you use one of the iOS convenience APIs for audio recording. No reason not to experiment with this, though.