Middleware for speech technology

An ongoing evolution

Speech technology is gaining maturity. This means that it becomes more reliable, more accurate, faster and better affordable and therefore gains interest from a businesses from a variety of verticals. On the other hand, speech engines (Cloud & On-premise) and related artificial intelligence are still evolving really fast. And will continue to do so in the next few years. This leads to a situation where companies want to implement speech recognition in their solutions, but do not want to bet on a single technology provider, because today’s best in class solutions could be outperformed by others tomorrow.

Middleware as an answer

This situation calls for a middleware solution. Middleware “stands in the middle” between speech technologies and your solution. A middleware solution provides connectivity and enables programmers to create business applications without having to custom-craft integrations for each new application. Speech to text middleware helps software and services components work together, providing a abstraction-layer of functionality for connectivity, data consistency, data-handling and flexible configuration. More concrete, this is:

• A solution that deals with the implementation of different speech engines (such as Nuance, Google, Watson, Azure, …) and avoids a vendor lock-in with a single supplier of speech technology. Switch whenever you want.
• A solution that allows optimizations of speech technology, both in terms of “language specific engines” and “redundancy”. Concrete: select different engines for different languages or multiple engines for a single language.
• A solution that allows combinations of technology from different technology vendors. For example: Transcribe speech to text with a solution of vendor A, and add text reduction (artificial intelligence) from vendor B.
• A solution that comes with an API, which can be integrated with third party solutions.
• A solution provider with knowledge on different speech engines and related artificial intelligence solutions who can help you to design and implement the optimal solution for your business.

The Earfy Engine is such a middleware solution for Speech Technology. We help you to optimize your business with speech technology.

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