Monthly Archives: March 2004

Kai-Fu Lee Keynote at SpeechTEK

By | March 31, 2004

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 »

SoccerPhone for 2004

By | March 28, 2004

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 Keynote at SpeechTEK

By | March 25, 2004

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 »

VoiceXML 2.1 Draft

By | March 23, 2004

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 »

SpeechTEK

By | March 21, 2004

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 »

Super Automatics

By | March 21, 2004

How It Works: Be Your Own Barista, With a Programmable Helper – [Free registration required] One of my favorite electronic devices at home is my Capresso C2000, which my wife purchased for me several years ago from Whole Latte Love. Capresso was discontinuing the C2000 model, so Whole Latte Love had a closeout sale on… Read More »

Success BBQ

By | March 21, 2004

I’m sure Success BBQ sounded like a good name for a restaurant when they opened the place. The barbed wire fence now surrounding the entire building suggests otherwise. I took this photo with the camera on my Treo 600 while my wife was driving down the street. I’ve gotten a bit better at extracting acceptable… Read More »

Recommending VXML and SRGS

By | March 17, 2004

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 »

Rumsy on the Hot Seat

By | March 16, 2004

stevenberlinjohnson.com: Rumsfeld Faces The Nation, And Stammers Donald Rumsfield is learning that if you make enough really bad decisions and then later lie about them in public to cover them up, the lies eventually come back to haunt you. During an interview on “Face the Nation” Rumsfeld choked out a denial that he or the… Read More »

Rhythmbox Reloaded

By | March 10, 2004

In a previous post, I described how I found xinf to be a better music player and library for Linux than Rhythmbox, a.k.a., Music Player. Rhythmbox was included on my Fedora install CDs, so I thought I would give it another chance. The short summary is that it is now my primary music player and… Read More »