Digium Partners with Vestec for 'Low-Cost' Speech Recognition Technology

As the open source movement continues to gain traction, developments to enhance the customer experience and ultimately drive bottom line growth are emerging from industry leaders.

 

Digium, Inc., the Huntsville, Ala.-based company that created and develops Asterisk (News - Alert), the open source telephony platform, and Canada-based Vestec, an innovator of affordable speech solutions, today announced a partnership to provide a “robust, low-cost” speech recognition engine for use with the open source Asterisk telephony platform.

 

Company officials said Vestec`s speech engine significantly lowers the cost barrier for introducing feature-rich speech recognition with Asterisk and provides the Asterisk community with a “powerful” means to enhance the customer experience as well as to generate new revenue.

 

Speech recognition technology has historically been affordable to only a small segment of the Asterisk community, open source experts said. However, Vestec`s speech engine significantly broadens the market for speech recognition applications with Asterisk by offering a speech solution at a cost of $99 per port, without any minimum port license purchase requirement.

 

“Speech recognition enhances customer interaction, but the price of powerful speech engines puts them out of reach of most Asterisk users,” said Bill Miller (News - Alert), vice president of product management at Digium, in a statement. “The Vestec speech engine allows any Asterisk user to cost-effectively build and deploy useful speech applications for a wide variety of demanding environments.”

 

Traditionally something of a niche phenomenon, open source PBXs have seen a significant surge over the past few years and it has become much more mainstream and more competitive with traditional communications systems.

 

Digium (News - Alert) is the creator, sponsor and driving force behind Asterisk, the most widely used open source telephony software. The company`s product lines include a wide range of software and hardware that enable businesses to implement turnkey unified communications solutions or to design their own VoIP systems. Resellers, telecom professionals and software developers choose Digium`s products because only Digium delivers the technical superiority, security and flexibility associated with Asterisk.

 

The Vestec Speech Engine is available from the Digium Web store and will be available through Digium North American channel partners in the near future. Company officials said the speech engine is easy to install, supports industry standard grammar, provides a vocabulary size sufficient for most applications, supports all major Asterisk releases and Linux distributions and includes the first year of maintenance. A low-cost, optional annual maintenance subscription will be available after the first year.

 

Digium also recently announced the availability of Skype (News - Alert) for Asterisk software, which lets customers make, receive and transfer Skype calls from within their Asterisk phone systems. It encrypts all voice calls and lets businesses manage their Skype accounts through Skype’s Web-based Business Control Panel, according to the company.
 

Skype lets users make free voice and video calls and send instant messaging. In addition, Skype users can share files over the Internet, as well as make low-cost calls to landlines and mobile phones.

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