Isn the Java Platform too slow to be used for speech recognition?
No, rumors of the poor performance of the Java platform are unfounded. Sphinx-4 runs faster than Sphinx 3.3 (CMUs fast recognizer) for many tests. For a good discussion of Java platform performance in speech engines look at FreeTTS – A Performance Case Study a technical paper that compares the performance of speech synthesis engine written in the Java programming language to its native-C counterpart.