Speech recognition is one of the many features of my current project which will be most probably developed in J2EE (other languages are also welcomed if their choice is justified).
Most of the links at google and on SO suggest the above mentioned three options, Sphinx 4, JSAPI directly and Google Speech API (making a server call to google and than getting the result as text).
What are the other freely available options for me ? And If I use Sphinx-4 how do I get the language model for general English to be used with it ?
Yes, there are.
Voxforge has acoustic and language models for HTK and Sphinx (http://voxforge.org/).