WombatNation

The Technology section of Der Spiegel Online has a long article on audio blogging [German | Google Translation] titled “audio blogs: Voices from the Web”. PhoneBlogger makes an appearance in the Internet links sidebar as “Audioblog solutions (III)” and in the main text of the article.

As translated by Google:

“The ink of the W3C-Empfehlung is not yet completely drying, there urge already ready for occupancy Web log solutions of Bevoice, Tellme, Audblog or open SOURCE projects such as Phoneblogger into the market.”

A better translation might be “Although the W3C standard for VoiceXML is only recently complete, the audio weblog solutions of BeVocal, TellMe, AudBlog, and open source projects like PhoneBlogger have already entered the market.”

Harold’s Audioblog/Mobileblogging News blog also showed up in the links sidebar.

alphaWorks : Transcription Portlet

Transcription Portlet is a voice portlet for transcribing telephony-based dictation. This technology makes large-vocabulary speech recognition technology available to telephony-based portal applications (portlets). It provides Java APIs through which developers can integrate transcription capabilities into a portlet application.

Oh, I could certainly use one of those. Unfortunately, it requires WebSphere Voice Application Access. WVAA includes a set of plug-ins for WebSphere Studio (which is based on Eclipse) and a bunch of runtime stuff.

WebSphere Voice Application Access also provides the runtime components that make up the voice portal server infrastructure: WebSphere Portal Server (WPS), WebSphere Application Server (WAS), IBM SecureWay®, IBM DB2®, IBM HTTP Server, and others.

If you haven’t seen the price tag for WebSphere Portal Server, take my word for it, it ain’t cheap.

Now if someone would be willing to host this as a web service, that would be sweet. I could easily modify PhoneBlogger to have it send the recorded audio file to the transcription web service and then retrieve the text via HTTP, or even email, which the Transcription Portlet already supports. The submission of the audio file would obviously include a userid for a user who had already spent time training the speech recognition system on her voice.

After TellMe dropped support for free VoiceXML application extensions on their public service, I didn’t have an easy way to make SoccerPhone available to others. The only way to reach it on TellMe now is to call in with my developer ID and password.

Fortunately, BeVocal allows you to make an application available without having to give out your password. So, to once again hear live Major League Soccer scores:

1. Dial 1-877-33-VOCAL (877-338-6225)
2. When prompted for a PIN, enter or say 7818
3. When prompted for a userid, enter or say 5301860

Unfortunately, that’s a lot of digits to enter, but that’s the cost of free.