Vestec and Digium Offer New Speech Recognition Engine for Asterisk

September 17, 2009
By Anuradha Shukla, TMCnet Contributor

Digium and Vestec have joined hands to provide a robust, low-cost speech recognition engine for use with the open source Asterisk telephony platform.
 
Digium (News - Alert) is the creator of Asterisk, a popular open source telephony software. Vestec, an innovator of affordable speech solutions, offers a unique speech engine that can reduce the costs for introducing feature-rich speech recognition with Asterisk (News - Alert). This engine also allows the Asterisk community to enhance the customer experience as well as to generate new revenue.
 
Bill Miller (News - Alert), vice president of product management at Digium, said that powerful speech engines are out of reach for most Asterisk users due to their high costs. This problem is recognized and solved by the Vestec speech engine that allows any Asterisk user to cost-effectively build and deploy useful speech applications for a wide variety of demanding environments.
 
Until now it was not always economically feasible for all Asterisk community companies to invest in speech recognition technology. Vestec has attempted to bridge this divide by offering a powerful speech solution at a cost of $99.00 per port. This solution comes without any minimum port license purchase requirement.
 
Commenting on the new launch, Fakhri Karray, president and CEO of Vestec, said that they aim to popularize speech recognition by offering powerful, affordable, versatile and easy-to-use speech engines.
 
They are able to bring down the cost by leveraging the latest advances in artificial intelligence that reduces the cost while increasing the performance of their speech products.
 
“We are thrilled to be selected by Digium as a partner and are looking forward to supporting the Asterisk open source telephony revolution with robust and affordable speech recognition,” Karray said.
 
Other benefits include easy installation, support for industry standard grammar and a vocabulary size sufficient for most applications. The speech engine also supports all major Asterisk releases and Linux distributions and includes the first year of maintenance.
 
According to company officials, users can choose to purchase a low-cost, optional annual maintenance subscription after the first year.

Anuradha Shukla is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anuradha’s article, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Kelly McGuire

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