The attendance at SpeechTEK West 2006 seems lighter than past years. One issue is that the technical sessions were in meeting rooms far away from the business sessions, so it was a little hard to tell just how many people were actually there in total. The business sessions were definitely more lightly attended than the… Read More »
I’ll be at SpeechTEK West in San Francisco next week. If anyone reading this will be there, email me or post a comment if you want to meet up. I’ll be in Voxify’s booth on Wednesday. Stop by if you want to hear first hand about the great platform and speech application templates we’ve built,… Read More »
IBM made a couple announcements Tuesday regarding progress on their “superhuman speech recognition initiative”. Their goal is to get performance comparable to human speech recognition in the next five years. Presumably, they have also selected a starting point for the clock to start ticking, as the tired cliche about high quality speech recognition is that… Read More »
Practically since the dawn of the Web, people have written about the possibility of offering voice access to websites over the phone. One of the biggest challenges is that many websites aren’t even accessible to special web browsers, e. g., IBM Home Page Reader, that are designed for people who are blind or who have… Read More »
I haven’t posted about PhoneBlogger in quite a while, but I’m thinking about updating and enhancing some of the code. A lot has happened in the audio/phone blogging world since I announced PhoneBlogger January 9, 2003, and posted the PhoneBlogger source code on SourceForge. One new buzzword is mobcasting. The Wikipedia page on mobcasting quotes… Read More »
Next week October 23-25 I will be in Phoenix for the ScanSoft/Nuance Conversations 2005 conference. ScanSoft formally changed their name to Nuance yesterday. During most of the time the Solutions Showcase area is open, you’ll be able to find me in the Voxify booth. If you’re also going to be at the conference, please stop… Read More »
Perhaps the speech recognition platform and application business has reached a new level of maturity, as a sudden wave of consolidation has begun to sweep through the industry. The biggest recent move was at the most basic level, i.e., the automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech engine level. While ScanSoft/SpeechWorks has been buying up ASR and… Read More »
Many months ago, IBM announced that they were open sourcing and donating their Reusable Dialog Components library to the Jakarta project at the Apache Software Foundation. Finally, version 1.0 of the RDC has been released. The RDC is a JSP tag library that simplifies the development of server side code for generating VoiceXML documents for… Read More »
It’s been ages since I’ve written about Soccerphone, or even about anything at all. The last few weeks have just been too hectic. But, I did find time this weekend to make a few updates to Soccerphone, which is an automated speech application I built a few years ago so I could receive live Major… Read More »
Like most technical specialties, the speech applications industry has a large number of official standards. Fortunately, many of these standards are widely implemented. The implementations aren’t perfectly consistent, of course, but they’re close enough that at Voxify we’ve been able to get our speech applications platform to run on different VoiceXML browsers and ASR and… Read More »