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Key Features of the Phonexia Speech Platform

The Phonexia Speech Platform is provided as a set of several components:

  • The Speech Engine (SPE) component is a REST API that includes technologies for the automated processing of audio files and audio streams. This component is usually provided in a specific configuration that meets the customer’s use case.
  • The Phonexia Browser component is an expert-level application (on top of the Speech Engine) with a graphical user interface for advanced evaluation.
  • The Reporting and Licensing Server (RLS) component is dedicated to limiting the capacities as purchased by a customer (if it is an on-premises deployment without access to the internet) or gathering and calculating the pay-as-you-go amount (if it is a deployment with access to the internet).

Speech technologies available​

The Speech Platform includes the following technologies. Technologies are available in the Speech Engine component based on its particular configuration (Voice Biometrics, Transcription System, etc.):

  • Speaker Identification (SID) – automatically detects a person based on their voice.
  • Speaker Diarization (DIAR) – automatically separates multiple speakers in mono audio.
  • Language Identification (LID) – detects the language or dialect spoken in a recording.
  • Speech to Text (STT) – converts speech into plain text (words or sentences) automatically; several languages supported.
  • Keyword Spotting (KWS) – detects specific keywords/phrases automatically without conversion to text; several languages supported.
  • Gender Identification (GID) – identifies whether a speaker is male or female.
  • Age Estimation (AGE) – estimates the speaker's age group.
  • Voice Activity Detection (VAD) – detects the audio part that contains voice.
  • Speech Quality Estimation (SQE) – measures the quality of speech.
  • Phoneme Recognizer (PHNREC) – converts speech into phonemes (written characters representing pronunciation); several languages supported.
  • Waveform Denoiser (DENOISER) – automatically improves the audibility of speech for human listeners.

Supported languages​

The LID, STT, and KWS technologies support various languages as listed in the Languages Available section:

Supported audio input​

The Speech Engine server supports various audio formats, as listed in the API reference under Audio Requirements.

It also supports RTP/HTTP stream processing, as listed in the API reference under RTP/HTTP Streams.

The Speech Engine allows the use of certain audio conversion tools, such as sox or ffmpeg. For the configuration of this functionality, see [SPE]/settings/phxspe.properties.

Note: Be aware that audio format conversion (e.g., if the original audio format is highly compressed) can decrease the accuracy of speech technologies.

Integration possibilities​

The Phonexia Speech Platform can be integrated into a partner’s application using the Speech Engine component (REST API).

Packages, updates vs. upgrades​

Our packages follow a bug fix > updates > upgrades approach.

The Speech Platform package is available with a typical set of technologies for download here.

Some packages are distributed with a limited set of speech technologies or even without any speech technologies.

Find more information in Packages, Updates vs. Upgrades.

You might also want to browse our product support lifecycle policy to see which versions are supported and maintained.

Capacity/licensing options​

A partner/customer needs to deploy capacity and licensing files to their deployment.
Several variants of licensing are available for our partners/customers depending on the stage of use:

1. Demo/evaluation stage​

  • Capacity – The user is given a small amount of capacity (usually capacity.dat is copied to the RLS component) to test that the Speech Platform meets their use case.
  • License – The "NET" license type. The license (usually one license.dat file copied to all Speech Platform components) is validated on the Phonexia.com licensing server via the internet (no audio is sent to Phonexia).

2. Production stage​

This depends on a business agreement with Phonexia, usually one of the following:

  1. Pay-as-you-go solution (for the commercial market):
    • Capacity & license are managed by the RLS component, which calculates the amount processed during a monthly period. The amount is reported by the RLS component (deployed on the customer’s side) to the RLS installed on the Phonexia side. The RLS requires capacity & license for security reasons only.
  2. Prepaid-amount-per-day solution (for the government market):
    • Capacity – The user is given the purchased amount of capacity (usually capacity.dat is copied to the RLS component).
    • License – The "HW" license type. The license (usually one license.dat file copied to all Speech Platform components) is bound to a hardware profile of the machine where the Speech Platform is deployed (an offline license).
  3. Project-based solution:
    • For big data-processing solutions, we offer special licensing variants. These are provided on a project basis. Please reach out to your Phonexia contact for more information.

Note: Learn more about Licensing.