The latest word from Digium involves speech recognition for Asterisk, the open source IP PBX. The effort involves a growing relationship with Incendonet, which specializes in — you guessed it — speech recognition. Here’s some analysis from The VAR Guy.
First, forget everything you know about speech recognition. Sure, the technology suffered a few black eyes nearly a decade ago, when the CEO of Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products (L&H) was arrested on fraud charges. And anyone who used early speech recognition tools knows the Soft Wear Often Didn’t Wok.
Still, there’s been progress on multiple fronts. Bill Gates since 1997 has been predicting that speech recognition would become an everyday user interface on PCs. Gates said the move to speech user interfaces would require about a decade of work. The VAR Guy believes Gates wasn’t that far off the mark. (As if Mr. Gates cares about or resident blogger’s opinion…)
These days, we’re all used to speech recognition applications, especially when it comes to in-car applications, smart phones and call center applications. And software packages like Dragon Naturally Speaking have gained critical mass.
Dialing Asterisk
Now, for the real point of this blog: Improved speech recognition applications for Asterisk, the fast-growing open source IP PBX. In recent months, Digium has been rapidly expanding its channel partner network. Now, that partner network will have access to Incendonet’s speech recognition software.
According to Incendonet, the company’s:
“SpeechBridge speech recognition software works with core enterprise applications, and with its integrated speech-attendant, email and calendaring applications customers will begin realizing a return on their investment from day one.”
Sounds wonderful. But does it work? Frankly, The VAR Guy has to make a few phone calls to learn more about Incendonet’s installed base, channel partner network and company size. But Incendonet has announced relationships with Adtran and ShoreTel — two well-known providers of VoIP and IP phone systems.
The VAR Guy will dig for more information at Astricon, an Asterisk conference scheduled for October 13-15 in Arizona.
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Speech rec. on * would be great, but the cost and processing power needed to run it take it out of the running for most small small businesses. In larger installations you have the server to run it but not in the stand alone appliance market. IMHO – hosted speech rec., using something like Adhearsion/Tropo from Voxeo is a more likely scenario..
The now defunct Response Point did hit a sweet spot here, but again I am not sure how many people actually pushed the magic blue button.
Andrew: Ah, Response Point. The VAR Guy misses the great debate about whether Microsoft would continue developing that product…
Thanks for the tips involving Voxeo and hosted approaches. The VAR Guy will check them out.
Well Schmooze Communications an asterisk based PBX has their magic button app, speech recg IVR’s and company directories included in all PBX’s sold for over 2 years now.
http://schmoozecom.com/magic_button.php
Schmooze: The VAR Guy will give your site a look.