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When Gerd Graumann last visited with us in December, we talked about Speech Technology Group‘s  natural text-to-speech voices and launched the speech humor contest. In this session he will announce the winner and play the funniest submissions.

The discussion will be on speech recognition technology, which has lately taken center stage though the widespread mobile adoption. Gerd will share with us how Speech Technology Group has taken a powerful 64-bit ASR that is used by thousands of companies exclusively within the unified communications space to work now with every platform that supports the industry standard MRCP interface.

Kevin Fleming and Malcolm Davenport call in from Europe for a session on the new Digium phones announced a few days ago.

More about the phones from Dave Michels on No Jitter

The recording is an informal chat (is there any other kind of VUC?) about Republic Wireless (why won’t Brian talk to us?) and Invoxia’s iOS desk phone, the one Michael Graves is evaluating.

2011 was a fantastic year for VUC. I was able to get to Astricon, thanks to Digium, and met several new VUC folks (such as the ubiquituous James Body) as well as seeing old friends again, including the elusive John Todd 2.0.

We’re on Google Plus this year and we hope to see it grow: http://gplus.to/vuc. Please spread the word. G+ is a great way for us to communicate about each week’s sessions. Don’t be shy, that’s what we’re there for.

We had help from great sponsors and partners: Voxeo Labs, Sangoma, OnSIP.com, e4strategies and of course our great partnerships with ZipDX and Voxbone.

We chatted with amazing people doing amazing things: Allison Smith, Bryan Johns, Simon Wood, John “Captain Crunch” Draper, Kevin Fleming, Chris Veazy, Danielle Morrill, Chris Matthieu, Diana Cionoiu, Gerd Graumann, Jason Goecke, Dan York , David Burgess, Steven Song, Dave Michels, Ward Mundy, Brough Turner, Eric Klein, Nir Simionovich, Ben Klang, Alok Saboo, Alex Balashov, Andy Abramson, Bryan Martin, John Riordan, Charlotte Oliver, Emil Ivov, Rob Wolpov, Mike Oeth, Thilo Salmon, Frederic Dickey, Pascal Doré, Todd Carothers, Randal Schwartz, Jim Gettys, Dave Taht, Hugh Goldstein, Adrian Georgescu, Andrew Kuan and all the great regulars!

Kevin Fleming  joins us to talk about Digium‘s Redundancy Series products.

Redundancy Series (aka “R-Series”) products, are a family of inexpensive, versatile appliances that enable physical layer failover of analog (POTS) and digital (T1, E1, PRI or BRI) telephony connections to Asterisk-based communications systems. The R-Series devices allows Asterisk administrators to create high-availability solutions that insure uninterrupted business communications, even in the event of a catastrophic hardware or software failure. R-Series appliances include all the tools necessary to build a fully redundant active/passive communications solution. If the primary server experiences a hardware or software fault, all telecom services will automatically switch to the backup server.

The R-Series integrates with software to mirror file systems, manages the transition of a shared IP address and monitors system health between the primary and backup. The R-Series family consists of 2 models, the analog R800 appliance and the digital R850 appliance. Each model supports eight (8) public switched telephone (PSTN) circuits. The appliances deliver PSTN circuits to each Asterisk server via Digium’s telephony interface cards. Management and failover communications between the Asterisk Servers and the R-Series appliance is done using a set of USB connections, which also provide power—saving energy costs over the lifespan of the appliance.

Asterisk SCF is a framework that will allow developers to move beyond voice and also create open source video and text that can be used for anything from embedded applications to enterprise and carrier solutions, according to Digium. It is delivered as a system of distributed components that can be deployed in clusters on a single system or on many systems, and will support pretty much all real-time IP communications including video, wideband audio, chat and desktop sharing.Asterisk SCF seeks to meet four requirements for businesses looking to deploy open source communications solutions:

• Performance
• Scalability
• Fault tolerance
• Extensibility

Live from Astricon (well it was when we recorded it), Kevin Fleming, director of software technologies at Digium joins us at talk about the big Digium announcement.  This discussion was made possible  by Tim Panton and Michael Graves. Kevin, Tim and Joshua Colp were in a room, surrounded by John Todd’s tie-dyed shirts.

[audio:http://voipusersconference.org/wp-content/uploads/amoocondiscussion.mp3|titles=AMOOCON 2009, Tim Panton, John Todd, Russell Brand, Kevin Fleming...]

Although I managed to herd a great group of people into the speakers’ lounge and record a wide-ranging discussion, the first part was lost due to a software glitch on the recorder. It seems that the low battery level shut things down and ditched the file. The part posted here is only the second hour (heh) but there are some interesting things to hear.

Topics covered include codecs, video, Skype for Asterisk, teleconference robots, “robot Mark”, presence, stereo codecs, and lots more. One side (Zoa, Diana Cionoiu etc) rags on the iPhone, the other side says “get used to it”.

MP3 DOWNLOAD LINK