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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »