New Scientist – Credit card only works when spoken to Beepcard has announced a new credit card they have developed that supports audio-based authentication for credit card transactions, via technology embedded within the card itself. This is a very cool idea, assuming they can get past a couple technology and personal adoption issues. Beepcard had… Read More »
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology addresses a very difficult to solve problem, but researchers have made a significant amount of progress over the last ten years or so. There are still many unsolved problems, but the quality of modern ASR engines has made speech a viable user interface for many different applications. Speech recognition technologies… Read More »
Kai-Fu Lee is the VP for Speech Solutions at Microsoft. He spoke at SpeechTEK after Bill Gates last week, going into much more detail on Microsoft Speech Server. Microsoft is targeting medium (25-250 agent equivalents), and large (250+ agent equivalents) enterprises. This was a bit surprising to me, as Speech Server appears to be a… Read More »
No, I’m not asking you to vote for SoccerPhone for President in 2004. I’m just letting anyone who cares know that SoccerPhone is working this year without me having to make any changes to the code. Fortunately, the people running the MLS website didn’t make any significant changes to the HTML code on the live… Read More »
Bill Gates was the main keynote speaker at SpeechTEK/VisualStudio Live/MS Mobile Devcon on Wednesday. This was the first time I’ve ever been in the same room with the richest man in the world. Just me, the rich guy, and a few thousand of my very best friends. The first ten minutes of his speech were… Read More »
Archive of W3C News in 2004 – Working Draft: VoiceXML 2.1 As announced on the W3C website, the voice browser working group email discussion list, and at the SpeechTEK conference I’m attending, the working draft for VoiceXML 2.1 was released today. The best news for me is that the <data> tag is part of the… Read More »
I’ll be at SpeechTEK Spring across the bay in San Francisco Tuesday through Friday. Leave a comment or email me at robert AT wombatnation DOT com if you’ll be there, too, and would like to meet up. I won’t be manning the Avaya booth, but I’ll definitely stop by there while the Expo is open.… Read More »
World Wide Web Consortium Issues VoiceXML 2.0 as a W3C Recommendation The W3C advanced VoiceXML 2.0 and Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) from Candidate Recommendation status to Recommendation status. Although vendors have been delivering products that implement the VXML 2.0 and SRGS specs for several years now, it’s good for the specifications to reach the… Read More »
W3C risks patent tussle in standard push | CNET News.com A software patent problem continues to hang over VoiceXML 2.0, which reached proposed recommendation status this month. The problem is that the Patent Advisory Group that was supposed to make sure that any relevant patents would be offered on royalty free terms never got Rutgers… Read More »
Now here’s something every kid will love. Santa Claus and his elf Pixel have been outsourced as VoiceXML applications. I guess wages for customer service reps at the North Pole have gone up too much.