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Working with Different Languages
The LumenVox Speech Engine includes support for American, Australian/NZ and UK English, Mexican Spanish, Colombian Spanish, and Canadian French.
By setting the language identifier in a grammar, you can load different acoustic models and get recognitions in various languages.
Configuring Acoustic Models
The Speech Engine comes complete with all of the acoustic models you need in order to use the supported languages. By default, the Speech Engine will only recognize American English. To use other languages, you must first copy them into the proper folder.
Inside the Engine's installation directory is a Lang folder, and inside of that is a directory called OtherLanguages which contains the various acoustic models. Simply copy the models you wish to use into the Dict directory in the Lang folder. Please note that you must stop and restart the Speech Engine service for these new models to be available.
It is very important to note that you cannot have two acoustic models active the same time. Within an application, you could switch between English and Spanish, but you could not decode an utterance against both models at the same time. This means you cannot have two grammars with different languages active at once -- doing so will cause an error.
Which Language to Use?
If the primary language your application needs to recognize is supported, then you will want to use that language. Applications deployed in the United States would be best served by American English, as opposed to Australian English.
Even if your language is not supported, you may find that one of our acoustic models suits your application. For instance, if you want to recognize Spanish speakers from Spain, our Mexican or Colombian Spanish models may work. Likewise, you may find that Australian English is closer to English spoken around the world than American English.
You may need to experiment a little bit to see which model works best for your speakers. Try different models and add phonetic spellings for words that are commonly misrecognized.
For more information, please see the help document or contact us at 1-877-977-0707.