Monthly Archives: September 2004

Ssh, the Robots Are Listening

By | September 27, 2004

IBM is working with researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands to develop a system that listens in on calls received at a call center, uses speech recognition to identify topics that a caller is asking about, looks up related information, and displays it to a call center agent. Sort of like the… Read More »

The Pleasures of Peat

By | September 26, 2004

How do I love, thee, peat? Let me count the ways. You amend the soils of my plants by helping the soil hold water, while still allowing sufficient oxygen transfer. You halt the germination of malted barley at the perfect moment, and give whisky a lovingly smoky flavor And finally, you help make for a… Read More »

Bavarian Beer Foamer

By | September 23, 2004

Oktoberfest Shop : Bavarian Beer Foamer This is an interesting repurposing of a common European kitchen tool. I use a nearly identical tool (except for the cool Beyerischer flag decal or sticker) to make a pseudo café latte every morning. My morning ritual is to heat about 1/3 of a coffee mug of milk in… Read More »

Johnny Ramone, RIP

By | September 16, 2004

From SFGate.com – Johnny Ramone, member of punk legends ‘The Ramones,’ dies at 55 We lost another one of the Ramones this week. Guitarist Johnny Ramone died at the age of fifty-five after being diagnosed with prostate cancer five years ago. Tommy is the only founding member left, and believe it or not, he was… Read More »

T-Mobile International

By | September 15, 2004

Sunday was the T-Mobile International bike race in San Francisco. Below are some thumbnail images of the photos I took with the camera on my Treo 600. The full-sized images are on another page.

IBM Opens Speech Code

By | September 14, 2004

When I first heard the announcement (full story from NY Times requires registration, excerpt from C|Net doesn’t), I was hoping that IBM was open sourcing their ASR and TTS engines. But, it turned out to be two other parts of their voice portfolio. IBM is donating source code for their Reusable Dialog Components to the… Read More »

Speech Recognition in the NY Times

By | September 9, 2004

A work colleague (thanks, Rob!) emailed me the text from an article in the NY Times about speech recognition applications (free registration required). It’s a mostly favorable discussion of commercial speech applications and speech recognition technologies, although, to no surprise, they ran across a couple frustrated users. One of the areas taking the biggest hit… Read More »

I Recommend SSML

By | September 8, 2004

And so does the W3C. Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.0 is now a W3C Recommendation. SSML is used with both VoiceXML and SALT to specify how text should be synthesized into speech. Congratulations to the co-editors from Nuance, Intel, and ScanSoft who ushered it through the process.

Caller ID Spoofing for Fun or Profit

By | September 4, 2004

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 »

Set High Beams to Stun

By | September 3, 2004

Speech-enabled cars have come a long way since the annoying recorded message “The door is ajar” appeared in cars in the 80’s, before quickly disappearing from later models. Honda and IBM are now working on a car that not only talks to you, but also listens. IBM’s contribution is an embedded version of their ViaVoice… Read More »