"The packages that the CMU Sphinx Group is releasing are a set of reasonably mature, world-class speech components that provide a basic level of technology to anyone interested in creating speech-using applications without the once-prohibitive initial investment cost in research and development; the same components are open to peer review by all researchers in the field, and are used for linguistic research as well.
Note however that Sphinx is not a final product. Those with a certain level of expertise can achieve great results with the versions of Sphinx available here, but a naive user will certainly need further help. In other words, the software available here is not meant for users with no experience in speech, but for expert users."
