I’m a little late to report this, but it happened below the Opus Research Radar. Around September 17, Digium began to market a low-cost speech recognition solution from Vestec, Inc. based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Vestec’s corporate charter, from its Web site, is “to commoditize, standardize, and demystify speech recognition through use of unique artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.” We’ve heard the “make speech affordable” message before from the likes of Lumenvox and Voxeo, as well as a number of “open source” community members around Sphynx.

In Digium, Vestec has found a partner that is promoting its speech recognition engine to the thrifty folks among the Asterisk community. We’ll be watching to see how well speech recognition becomes ingrained in the Asterisk fabric. We do note that commoditization of speech is but the first step of the longer journey of creating a good user experience.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Recombinant Telephony, Speech recognition