Lots of hacking on Sphinx-II. The codebase is now almost totally converted to ANSI C, and a lot of the interfaces are now exposed to people who want to, say, write Perl modules for them ... which I have also done. The Perl module is not anywhere near ready for release and there are some copyright and namespace issues to be resolved before anything can go out, but it shouldn't be too long now.
Also, Sphinx is talking, er, listening to the telephone. I get much better recognition from the phone handset (at 8kHz) than from the microphone (at 16kHz) though I guess that shouldn't surprise me since there's a lot less background noise on the handset.
POE is great. use POE.