A work colleague (thanks, Rob!) emailed me the text from an article in the NY Times about speech recognition applications (free registration required). It’s a mostly favorable discussion of commercial speech applications and speech recognition technologies, although, to no surprise, they ran across a couple frustrated users. One of the areas taking the biggest hit… Read More »
And so does the W3C. Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.0 is now a W3C Recommendation. SSML is used with both VoiceXML and SALT to specify how text should be synthesized into speech. Congratulations to the co-editors from Nuance, Intel, and ScanSoft who ushered it through the process.
Although the ability to spoof caller ID has been around for quite awhile, I wasn’t aware of any public services that offered that capability. On August 31, a company called *38 launched a service for spoofing caller ID. With stories quickly appearing on SlashDot and the New York Times (registration required), *38 picked up a… Read More »
Speech-enabled cars have come a long way since the annoying recorded message “The door is ajar” appeared in cars in the 80’s, before quickly disappearing from later models. Honda and IBM are now working on a car that not only talks to you, but also listens. IBM’s contribution is an embedded version of their ViaVoice… Read More »
A great VoiceXML tutorial just showed up in the Voice section of the Developer.com website. It’s just part one of a three-part series, but IBM’s Jeff Kusnitz and Bruce Lucas covered a lot of ground in a fairly short article. I wish I had run across an introduction to VoiceXML like this one when I… Read More »
I had run across the online demo of the AT&T Natural Voices TTS engine quite awhile ago, but seeing a reference to it in an article today on Slashdot reminded me of how cool it is. You enter text in a text box and choose a voice from a list of thirteen. The list includes… Read More »
Tuesday, the CSS working group at the W3C releasd a working draft for a CSS3 Speech Module. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a language for describing the rendering of HTML and XML documents on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. CSS define aural properties that give control over rendering XML to speech. This draft describes… Read More »
Polite computers win users’ hearts and minds [New Scientist] A study by Jeng-Yi Tzeng at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan suggests that computer users would be more tolerant of software programs if the programs were more apologetic, or at the very least, less likely to always blame the user. This is especially relevant… Read More »
Jim Larson, co-chair of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group, recently posted on the www-voice mailing list that work is well underway on VoiceXML 3. He wrote: The purpose of V3 is to provide powerful dialog capabilities that can be used to build advanced speech applications, and to provide these capabilities in a form that… Read More »
After nearly eleven years at Avaya/Lucent/Mosaix/ViewStar (strung together by two acquisitions and a spin-off), I’ve decided to move on to Voxify, a speech applications startup in Alameda. My last day at Avaya was May 7th. The killer blow for me was that this month Avaya is moving the R&D team from the Dublin office to… Read More »