Batch Virtual Appliance

Important Notices

The new enhanced model requires increased compute requirements and new recommended AVX flags. Please check the updated system requirements in the installation guide and ensure your hardware meets Speechmatics' recommendations. Otherwise you may see a slow down in processing speed when using the enhanced model. It is also now necessary to run the appliance on processors that support AVX2 in order to take advantage of latest performance optimisations for both the standard and enhanced model for all language packs.

If you are importing an appliance through VirtualBox, and AVX flags are not automatically enabled, you can also take advantage of the the performance benefits from AVX2 following these guidelines.

4.1.0

New

  • 16 Languages updated with additional punctuation marks for improved readability
    • The following languages now support (. ? , !): Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Greek, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Korean
  • New parameter added for controlling Speaker Diarization sensitivity: speaker_sensitivity. Refer to our documentation here for more details

Improved

  • Improved accuracy for French, including more data for Canadian French (fr-ca)
  • Improved accuracy for Portuguese, including more data for Brazilian Portuguese (pt-br)
  • Improved accuracy in standard operating point for Romanian, Hungarian, Danish, Slovakian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Slovenian, Lithuanian
  • Updated Danish, Norwegian and Swedish to remove undesired character sets
  • Improved accuracy in localised spelling for English output locale feature
  • Improved accuracy of percentage symbol recognition in French

Fixed

  • Fixes for English and Italian written form numeric entities
  • Fix for handling small number of files with multiple audio channels were mistakenly detected as containing inverted audio, which lead to no transcription being returned

Known Limitations

The following are known issues in this release:

Issue IDSummaryDetailed Description and Possible Workarounds
REQ-1409Proteus HCL with <unk> causes out of memory errorA custom dictionary list that contains the word '' causes the worker to crash.
REQ-7549Memory leak affecting gRPCThere is a small memory leak in the gRPC Python server https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/5913.
REQ-10160Advanced punctuation for Spanish (es) does not contain inverted marks.Inverted marks [ ¿ ¡ ] are not currently available for Spanish advanced punctuation.
REQ-10627Double full stops when acronym is at the end of the sentenceIf there is an acronym at the end of the sentence, then a double full stop will be output, for example: "team G.B.."
REQ-10634Putting "-" as an item in additional vocab configuration will cause the container to failDo not enter just a "-" on its own in Custom Dictionary either as an additional vocab item or in the sounds_like property. Hyphens are still supported when entered as part of phrases or words
REQ-14402When running very large numbers of small jobs (less than 10 seconds) offline, this may cause some of the jobs to be rejectedIf you encounter this issue, please ensure licensing is in offline mode when running the appliance offline

Supported Platforms

Virtual Appliance image (OVA) for installation on:

  • VMware ESXi 6.5+ or VMware Workstation Player.
  • VirtualBox 5.2+
  • Amazon EC2

See the Installation and Admin Guide for details on the minimum specifications for the VM. The maximum number of concurrent jobs (maxworkers) that you can run on a single appliance is 30.

Form Factors

VariantImage SizeMax. Disk SpaceLanguages
nano10GB40GBen
mini15GB40GBen, de, es
midi30GB60GBen, de, es, fr, ko, ja, nl, pt
maxi52GB80GBen, de, es, fr, ko, ja, nl, pt, it, da, pl, ca, hi, ru, sv
plus61GB80GBen, cmn, no, ar, bg, cs, el, fi, hu, hr, lt, lv, ro, sk, sl, tr, ms, id, yue

Upgrade Path

Remove the license from your old appliance (see the Admin Guide), then re-import the new OVA and configure networking as per the Installation and Admin guide. You will need to re-apply the license code you have once the OVA has imported.

Installation

Upload the OVA to VMWare ESX, VMWare Workstation Player, or VirtualBox. See the Installation and Admin Guide for more information.

Performance at Scale

Further notes on IOPS requirements under heavy usage of the appliance are now provided in the System Requirements section of the Installation Guide.