Digium (News - Alert), the Asterisk Company, and Aumtech, a vendor of speech and computer telephony integration products, have announced a partner relationship between the companies.

Asterisk (News - Alert) users now have a speech alternative, featuring server-based licenses that support 48+ ports of Automated Speech Recognition for less than the cost of one or two competitive ASR licenses.

Aumtech's offering provides 48+ ports of multi-language speech recognition for the Asterisk platform with support for $1,975 per port. Aumtech officials say users can now support an entire ASR server with 8, 24, or 48+ ASR licenses for a first-year cost of just $1,975 and $1,275 annually thereafter.

Aumtech is introducing its Media Resource Control Protocol Connector utility, which lets Asterisk customers access the Microsoft (News - Alert) Speech Services 2007 ASR. This includes, company officials say, 'unlimited grammars and multiple languages of ASR; the list of 14 available languages and voices is constantly growing, and there are successful installations in North America, South America, Europe and the Far East.'

Asterisk users can access the speech product on Asterisk and on a variety of Interactive Voice Response tools, including Aumtech's VoiceXML 2.1 Certified IVR platform, or other standards-based IVR platforms.

The Aumtech MRCP Connector for the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server lets companies using Linux build speech-driven applications with the Microsoft ASR product. Since the MRCP Connector is based on the WC3 Forum's open standard, applications running on open platforms such as Asterisk can access Microsoft's speech recognition functions through Aumtech's Connector.

Last week TMC's (News - Alert) Brendan Read reported that Digium has begun offering small- to mid-sized businesses 'a powerful new tool to punch up productivity and flexibility that allow them to emerge from the slowly receding recession swinging.'

Digium’s new Switchvox (News - Alert) SMB 4.5 unified communications-enabled IP-PBX now delivers key applications that have been traditionally accessed through the Web interface directly to phone handsets, Read wrote: 'The new version of the Digium product, which has been expressly designed for SMBs in mind, and is based on its Asterisk open source telephony engine, also adds greater flexibility and control for users and administrators.'

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