Real-time Virtual Appliance

Removal Note

The legacy V1 API that the Real-time Virtual Appliance supported is now removed. We recommend all customers move to using the V2 API. Please see the section How to use the V2 API.

Important Notices

Speechmatics now supports exclusively speechmatics-python for use in both our Real-time Container and our Real-time Virtual Appliance. The older library smwebsocket-py will still work, but is not compatible with the new enhanced model and is no longer supported. Please see here for access to speechmatics-python.

The new enhanced model has increased compute requirements and new recommended AVX flags. Each concurrent worker will require at least 3GB of memory and up to 5GB if using other features such as Custom Dictionary. 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 AVX 2 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

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 the issue where occasional end times of words could be before the start time

Deprecated

  • Deprecation of the V1 API for Real-time Virtual Appliance

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-11792Speaker change token positioning is incorrectWe are aware of a consistent mis-placing of the speaker change token after the first word of the new speakers' sentence rather than before it.
REQ-12202High memory usage when using custom dictionaryIt has been observed that when using custom dictionary an additional 800-1700MB of memory is required (depending on the size of the wordlist used).
REQ-16256Heavy usage of RAM when swapping between 8kHz and 16kHz inputWhere multiple persistent workers are configured with Custom Dictionary that swap between 8kHz and 16kHz input, this can cause a memory leak that causes the container to crash. If this starts to impact services it is recommended to restart all the services with the management API or drop the worker count to 1 and then increase it again

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

There are five variants of the Real-time Virtual Appliance.

VariantImage SizeMax. Disk SpaceLanguages
nano9GB40GBen
mini13GB40GBen, de, es
midi23GB60GBen, de, es, fr, ko, ja, nl, pt
maxi38GB80GBen, de, es, fr, ko, ja, nl, pt, it, da, pl, ca, hi, ru, sv
plus45GB80GBen, 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.