A fast performance-oriented recognizer, originally developed by Xuedong Huang at Carnegie Mellon and released as open-source with a BSD-style license on SourceForge by Kevin Lenzo at LinuxWorld in 2000.
Recent developments (in algorithms and in hardware) have made Sphinx 3 "near" real-time, although not yet suitable for critical interactive applications.
Sun Microsystems supported the development of Sphinx 4 and contributed software engineering expertise to the project.
Current development goals include: A version of Sphinx that can be used in embedded systems (e.g., based on an ARM processor).
PocketSphinx is under active development and incorporates features such as fixed-point arithmetic and efficient algorithms for GMM computation.