Vestec and Digium Partner to Offer Full-featured, Low-priced Speech Recognition for Asterisk

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. & WATERLOO, Ontario--(Business Wire)--
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.

About Vestec

Vestec`s goal is to commoditize, standardize and demystify speech recognition
through use of unique emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The
company believes speech recognition has not enjoyed broad acceptance due to the
high cost of speech-enabling products, unavailability of useful turnkey speech
applications and reliance on expensive professional services for sophisticated
application development. Vestec`s speech engine delivers performance comparable
to leading conventional engines at a fraction of their cost and empowers speech
application developers via its ease-of-use. Vestec intends to support its speech
engine with provision of a variety of useful, low-cost, standardized, turnkey
speech applications for Asterisk. More information is available at
http://www.evestech.com/

About Digium

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, 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.

Digium
Julie Webb, +1 256-428-6203
jwebb@digium.com
or
Vestec
Kashif Kahn, +1 519-885-7615
info@evestech.com

Copyright Business Wire 2009