Hi Jan,

Our answers to your questions are as follows. Please note that there is a wide variety of information available on our website under "Speech Engine" pull-down menu. You should also review Freeswitch section under "Soft-PBX" for free connector and engine pricing information. Our website is: http://www.vestec.ca/
1) What languages do you support

We currently support American English and working on major European and Asian language acoustic models as well.

2) What are your recognition stats per language?

Three points are worthy of note here:

(a) we have rigorously benchmarked our recognition accuracy against leading commercial engines in the market and can safely say that we deliver among the highest recognition accuracy in the industry;

(b) generally speaking, a native speaker can expect a recognition accuracy - without "tuning" - in the 90% range while a non-native speaker can expect a recognition accuracy - again, without "tuning" - in the 80% range. Grammar "tuning" - for example, via addition of custom pronunciations for difficult to recognize words - generally improves recognition accuracy by an additional 5-10%;

(c) in comparative testing against some of the leading commercial speech engines, we scored an accuracy improvement of over 3%. See: http://www.vestec.ca/recog_acc

3) What are the benefits of using this compared to Sphinx/Pocketsphinx?

There are two fundamental advantages of using Vestec over Sphinx:

(a) Vestec speech engine comes with a robust acoustic model while for Sphinx you need to develop your own acoustic model. (Acoustic model is the "ear drum" if you will that does the recognition). Now, development of a high quality acoustic model is no mean feat, even if you have the necessary tools. For starters you need high quality training data that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Next, you need highly specialized knowledge in order to properly manipulate the various parameters of training tools for optimal recognition quality. Finally, you need to be fully prepared to undertake a trial-and-error process - sometimes spanning 6-8 months - to achieve the desired recognition accuracy results, with the right data and training tools.

(b) Unlike Sphinx, Vestec speech engine supports industry standard grammar writing format. This allows you to port your existing standard grammars to the engine as well as make sure that your work is reusable. Similarly, we provide a variety of useful grammar writing tools and functions that are not available with Sphinx to make the developer's job a lot easier.

4) How does the (1) installation of a license happen, (2) license check happen.

You need to put the license files that you purchase from Vestec webstore under a specific directory. The engine then takes care of the rest. The license check is host based. In other words, every license is bounded to one physical/virtual machine. You cannot buy one port license and expect to run the speech engine on several machines.

5) Does the licensing server support redundancy schemes?

We used to have a redundancy scheme but recently disabled it in preparation for the release of a new architecture. The redundancy scheme will be integrated in the new architecture that will support MRCP. Please note that software maintenance - covering patches and major upgrades - is free for the first 12 months since date of license purchase. So, you will be able to transition to the new architecture over next several months if you were to purchase a license now.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,
-Kashif