About two weeks ago, I posted about the MGM DVD Class Action Settlement. As in my last post, this one will be half about MGM DVDs and half about speech applications. And if you are looking for a really meaningful discussion of the technical details behind the settlement, you should stop reading my blog immediately… Read More »
As seen recently on Slashdot, MGM recently settled a class action suit involving the image quality of DVDs they sold under the classification of “widescreen”. The claim is that the image width of the alleged widescreen versions was no different than for the standard versions. As per normal class action settlement verbiage, MGM denies any… Read More »
VoiceXML Review used to regularly publish interesting articles and news updates related to VoiceXML, but had fallen somewhat silent over the last six months or so. A lot has been going on with respect to VXML 2.1 and 3.0, so I’ve been hoping to see some more activity on the site. It’s good to see… Read More »
I’m back from vacation, but am unfortunately one of the people who has suffered due to the current troubles at US Airways. My outbound flight from San Francisco to Orlando (I went on a cruise, not to the Disney greater metropolitan theme park) was operated by United, codeshared with US Air. Unfortunately for me, the… Read More »
The Baltimore Sun published an excellent, detailed article on expressive speech synthesis [requires free registration] that focuses mostly on work going on at IBM. The resulting speech synthesizer would be not only be able to laugh, cough, pause for a breath, and say uh and um, but would also be able to smoothly switch between… Read More »
My main experience with XML-based programming languages has been with VoiceXML. One nice advantage of an XML-based language is that the syntax checker is essentially free, assuming the language provides a DTD, or preferably a Schema. Of course, most language compilers and interpreters also come with a syntax checker, so the DTD/Schema advantage is primarily… Read More »
A great article on Voxify appeared in the East Bay Business Times this week. In addition to providing some interesting background on the company founders, page three of the article provides a good description of what we do. In short, we design and build speech recognition applications that enable automated customer service solutions for clients… Read More »
A beta version of Sphinx-4, an open source speech recognition engine implemented in Java, was recently released. Sphinx development is centered out of Carnegie-Mellon University, with major contributions from employees at Sun, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, and HP and smaller contributions from individuals at UC Santa Cruz and MIT. Ideas that are unlikely to come… Read More »
IBM is working with researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands to develop a system that listens in on calls received at a call center, uses speech recognition to identify topics that a caller is asking about, looks up related information, and displays it to a call center agent. Sort of like the… Read More »
When I first heard the announcement (full story from NY Times requires registration, excerpt from C|Net doesn’t), I was hoping that IBM was open sourcing their ASR and TTS engines. But, it turned out to be two other parts of their voice portfolio. IBM is donating source code for their Reusable Dialog Components to the… Read More »