Is there Anyone that has experience with any open source, or relatively cheap voice recognition API for java? I\'m pretty much looking for something that will turn spoken words
you can download vPass (voice password) from http://www.basic-signalprocessing.com.
The components are designed for Java and .Net language. The recognition period is 5 seconds. VPass is well tested vText is not, still new, that's why not packaged yet.
My group finished a mini program in Java to recognize spoken digits using Sphinx.
Mostly Java: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/cmusphinx.php
sphinx is by far the best option available if you are on a budget. however it also makes a huge difference what models you use, how you tune them and how you tune your audio source. absolutely everything has to match otherwise it just wont work. given the problem you described id be willing to bet a substantial sum that you've got you got your models mixed up and your mic is not correctly calibrated. also, if you have an accent it probably will not work - this is not an issue with the decoder but with the acoustic models - if no one with a voice/accent similar to yours was included in the training data you'll get poor results.
that said, have you looked at their open source models page?
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/models/
depending on what you are trying to do you should be able to obtain about 90% accuracy on free speech with the 16kHz WSJ models and the gigaword LMs NVP. i caution however that ASR is a massive undertaking and hasn't yet reached commodity status.
I have been looking for the same thing for a few days now. So far I have found Sphinx4 and FreeTTS. Both are java implementations and Sphinx seems like it is updated rather frequently unlike FreeTTS. The only problem that I am having is that Sphinx is having problems understanding me in an office environment, and I need a solution for a warehouse environment.