LumenVox has been busy this last year. They launched the 8.0 release of their LumenVox speech engine, with support for MRCP V2 and Sun SPARC Solaris. They announced Voice Activity Detection (VAD), which greatly increased the accuracy of their ASR by enabling better detection of the human voice amidst all other background noise. They also added on a bunch of new partners.

All this is well and good, but what really got my interest is that they are primarily targeting the SMB market, which in my opinion, is underserved, and if you read my last post on unified communications, under supported. With LumenVox it is neither.

To serve this market, LumenVox has done some things that are essential. They have kept the price of their engine low – OK, not as low as what Microsoft just announced, but we aren’t talking server-based enterprise here. They have partnered with players in the SMB space, and are beginning to provide true plug-and-play applications for the SMB market along with them, and they have turned their web site into self-service, service and support machine (The last point is my impression after reviewing it, not something they said).

Let’s look at two of their partners as examples of how deploying speech into an SMB is now easier, and how the deployment of speech just got accelerated. One huge coup for LumenVox is they are the only speech vendor for Digium, maker of Asterisk, a wildly popular, open source, PBX. LumenVox is completely integrated into their product through a unique connector bridge from digium. As part of the partnership, LumenVox created a $50 speech starter kit that includes the connector bridge and one LumenVox Speech Engine Lite port. In the year since they inked that partnership, LumenVox has sold over 700 kits to Asterisk developers, and even if you eliminate the “speech geek” tire kickers, that is a huge amount of sales and interest in one year from one partner.

Another example is their partnership with Incendonet, who markets SpeechBridge, a family of applications, such as calendaring, mobile email access, and auto-attendant, that integrate into a network or as an appliance attached - via SIP - to an IP-PBX. The plug-and-play nature of these applications is making it so much easier for the small guys to deploy and get a lot of out of automating with speech. Next up for LumenVox is a lot more “packaged” applications to address this market, along with Incendonet and other partners.

Now as for that support machine, go take a look at their site. Weekly, they publish a training video highlighting a different aspect of deploying speech. They have white papers that mirror those, all manner of FAQs, case studies, articles, developer tips and help, including really cool things like their SpeechTuner, their speech tuning and maintenance tool.

The timing is right for LumenVox too. With the emergence of VoiceXML platforms, increased adoption of VoIP, better tools, etc., along with a quantum leap in awareness by smaller companies of the capabilities of automating business functions, particularly with speech (Thank you Microsoft and Nuance, among others), LumenVox and its partners have a lot of low hanging fruit to pick.