Digium and Vestec partner to provide a robust, low-cost speech recognition engine for use with the open source Asterisk telephony platform. 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. Vestec’s speech engine significantly broadens the market for speech recognition applications with Asterisk by offering a powerful speech solution at a cost of $99 per port, without any minimum port license purchase requirement. 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 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 immediately from the Digium web store at a list price of U.S. $99 per port, and will be available through Digium North American channel partners in the near future.