Julie Webb
Digium
+1 (256) 428-6203
jwebb@digium.com
Kashif Kahn
Vestec
+1 (519) 885-7615
info@evestech.com
Huntsville, Ala., and WATERLOO, Ontario—September 16, 2009. Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, and 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. 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.
“Speech recognition enhances customer interaction, but the price of powerful speech engines puts them out of reach of most Asterisk users,” said Bill Miller, vice president of product management at Digium. “The Vestec speech engine allows any Asterisk user to cost-effectively build and deploy useful speech applications for a wide variety of demanding environments.”
“Our aim is to popularize speech recognition by offering powerful, affordable, versatile and easy-to-use speech engines,” said Dr. Fakhri Karray, president and CEO of Vestec. “We utilize the latest advances in artificial intelligence to reduce the cost while increasing the performance of our speech products. We are thrilled to be selected by Digium as a partner and are looking forward to supporting the Asterisk open source telephony revolution with robust and affordable speech recognition.”
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.
Digium® , Inc., the Asterisk® Company, created, owns and is the innovative force behind Asterisk, the most widely used open source telephony software. Since its founding in 1999, Digium has become the open source alternative to proprietary communication providers, with offerings that cost as much as 80 percent less. Digium offers Asterisk software free to the open source community and offers Asterisk Business Edition and Switchvox IP PBX software to power a broad family of products for small, medium and large businesses. The company’s product line includes a wide range of hardware and software to enable resellers and customers to implement turnkey VoIP systems or to design their own custom telephony solutions. More information is available at http://www.digium.com.
The Digium logo, Digium, Asterisk, Asterisk SCF, Switchvox, Asterisk Business Edition, AsteriskNOW, Asterisk Appliance and the Asterisk logo are trademarks of Digium, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
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