Deprecated Content
This page refers to outdated, obsolete, or deprecated products or software. This is provided for historical reference for users of older releases.
Getting Started
The LumenVox ASR was the first
commercial ASR product to be integrated with the Asterisk PBX voice platform.
This integration was initially performed by Digium, the maintainers of
Asterisk, and the design of the Asterisk speech recognition interface was
influenced by this integration.
A standard Asterisk module called
res_speech.so provides a set of Asterisk dialplan applications that can be used
to perform speech recognition functionality. These include SpeechBackground(),
which functions similarly to the common Background() application. Where
Background() plays an audio file and waits for DTMF entry, SpeechBackground()
plays an audio file and waits for either speech or DTMF entry.
A special Asterisk module,
res_speech_lumenvox.so, is written by Digium and distributed by LumenVox that
provides a connection between the Asterisk dialplan applications and the
LumenVox ASR (this module is commonly referred to as the “Asterisk-LumenVox
connector bridge”). In the time since this was initially developed, an open
source project called UniMRCP that leverages the open Media Resource Control
Protocol (MRCP) developed a set of Asterisk modules (res_speech_unimrcp.so)
that also connect the Asterisk dialplan applications to the LumenVox ASR.
To use ASR on Asterisk, users may
make use of either the Digium-maintained res_speech_lumenvox.so or the
community-maintained UniMRCP solution. Digium provides support for its solution
while the UniMRCP solution, being a free, open source project, has no official
support. The primary reason to make use of the UniMRCP solution is that it
provides text-to-speech (TTS) functionality in addition to ASR functionality.
There is currently no officially-supported method of using TTS with Asterisk,
so many in the community leverage the UniMRCP modules for this purpose.
Looking for Release Notes or Something Else? This document mainly covers the LumenVox-Asterisk integration. See our full Engine Help for a more detailed reference to the LumenVox software, including complete release notes for each software version.
