In late 2002, I thought it would be cool to build an application that allowed you to blog by phone. Tools, libraries and hosted services were a bit more limited back then, but after a few months of learning, coding and debugging, I managed to release the first version of PhoneBlogger in January 2003. Along… Read More »
An article in Speech Technology magazine reports that in the most recent update to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IVRs, Microsoft Speech Server and Nuance Voice Portal got dropped. The disappearance of NVP is no surprise, since Nuance announced at their Conversations conference over two years ago that they would no longer enhance it. Microsoft moved… Read More »
AVIOS is having their second speech app building contest for student teams. “Cash and/or equipment prizes valued at over $1000 will be awarded to teams of student programmers who design and create applications judged by industry experts to be the most robust, useful, creative, innovative, and user friendly.” The finished application must be submitted by… Read More »
Patrick Barnard wrote a very nice post about Voxify on his Making Contact TMCnet blog after speaking with the heads of our sales and marketing groups. Patrick’s post aptly summarizes the nature of the hosted speech applications that Voxify provides. For the sake of credibility regarding real world speech application implementations, it’s important to note… Read More »
SoccerPhone is a speech application I wrote about five years ago so I could get live updates on Major League Soccer scores whenever I was away from an Internet connection. I wrote the application in VoiceXML, JavaScript, and Python. Since SoccerPhone gathers the live data by scraping information from the HTML scoreboard page on the… Read More »
Microsoft recently announced that Speech Server 2007 will provide support for speech applications written in VoiceXML. In order to penetrate the enterprise market for speech applications, Microsoft really had no choice. SALT-based applications remain as rare as hen’s teeth in the enterprise. Ok, maybe not that rare, but certainly the number pales in comparison to… Read More »
In the afternoon, I attended two sessions on multimodal applications. Dave Raggett from the W3C started the session with a talk on Speech Enabling Web Browsers. He has been working on some prototype applications that combine AJAX with speech. He uses a local HTTP server to handle audio on the device (which, for now, is… Read More »
Tuesday morning I attended sessions on core speech technology and dialog design. Dr. Randy Ford from Sonum Technologies, talked about using strong Natural Language Processing (NLP) to improve speech recognition. He claimed that by using N-gram substitution (e.g., replace the likely misrec “think you” with “thank you”), phonetic tumbling, or a hybrid of the two,… 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 »
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 »