Monthly Archives: February 2006

SpeechTEK West 2006 Day 2 Afternoon

By | February 21, 2006

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 »

Backup Your Photos Now

By | February 20, 2006

I’ve uploaded many photos to my website gallery and to this blog, but Hurricane Katrina has made me realize just how important it is to use my website to backup the photos on only one of my computers and the photo prints I have still yet to scan. Although Dreamhost’s servers are in earthquake country… Read More »

Trouble with NBC HD Signal

By | February 12, 2006

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and have an HD over-the-air receiver, you may have run into problems in the last week if you tried to watch the Olympics in HD on NBC 11. Instead of getting a nice, crisp HD image of people moving quickly across the white stuff, you would… Read More »

SpeechTEK West 2006 Day 2 Morning

By | February 4, 2006

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 »

Tasmanian Devils and Cancer

By | February 2, 2006

New Scientist recently ran an article on an unusual infectious cancer that has killed one third of the wild population of Tasmanian Devils. I took this picture of a Tasmanian Devil at the Tasmanian Devil Park and Wildlife Rescue Center in Taranna in Tasmania, Australia. Several of the Devils there had terrible facial scars along… Read More »

SpeechTEK West 2006 Day 1

By | February 1, 2006

The attendance at SpeechTEK West 2006 seems lighter than past years. One issue is that the technical sessions were in meeting rooms far away from the business sessions, so it was a little hard to tell just how many people were actually there in total. The business sessions were definitely more lightly attended than the… Read More »