An open-source speech recognition platform called ‘Simon’ has been developed under the General Public License (GPL), in order to serve people with locomotor and cognitive dysfunctions with an advanced speech recognition system (SRC).

In general, speech recognition is a process of converting an acoustic signal (captured by a microphone or a telephone) to a set of words. Some of the speech recognition applications include voice dialing, call routing, content-based spoken audio search, simple data entry, preparation of structured documents and speech-to-text processing.

The GNU GPL facilitates users of any software with the freedom to share and change the software code accordingly. 

This new language-independent open-source speech recognition program facilitates in customization for any application where speech recognition is required. It is specially designed to be very flexible and can replace the mouse and keyboard, thereby enabling physically disabled people to write e-mails, chat, surf the internet, do internet-banking and much more.

The Simon speech recognition system incorporates four parts: language model, recognizer, parser, and action mapper. The language model is a package with pronunciation's statistic data. The recognizer processes the input of voice data and transforms it into a stream of phonemes, while parser transforms these phonemes into words. The action mapper recognizes transmitted stream of words with the help of preconfigured commands.

"The target groups of Simon are people, who can't or hardly use the mouse or keyboard, it can also be useful in case of cognitive and linguistic problems, because it has a personalized language model and individually arranged definition of implementation," said Mr. Franz Stieger, owner of Cyber Byte EDV Services.

 Cyber Byte EDV Services is supporting Simon platform. Other companies and organizations supporting Simon include Graz University of technology, infineon, agentur.net, interxion, sourceforge.net, ERSTE, and HTBLA.

Simon, based on an open-source platform, is free of cost. The necessary adaptations need pedagogical-therapeutic as well as advanced technical skills. In this regard, Simon’s developers provide training as well as instructions via specialized workshops. Some of the workshops provided are - impulse-workshop for interested people; intensive-workshop for therapists and pedagogues; and implementation-workshop for therapists, pedagogues and clients.