Patrick Barnard wrote a very nice post about Voxify on his Making Contact TMCnet blog after speaking with the heads of our sales and marketing groups. Patrick’s post aptly summarizes the nature of the hosted speech applications that Voxify provides. For the sake of credibility regarding real world speech application implementations, it’s important to note… Read More »
If you’re still using DRM’d audio formats, you owe it to yourself to check out Ogg Vorbis. It’s not just a pretty name anymore. The FSF has set up the PlayOgg.org website to promote Ogg Vorbis (audio) and Ogg Theora (video) as high quality media formats unencumbered by patents and restrictions on your rights. There… Read More »
After reading an article about Charles Wang and the “culture of fear” he allegedly instituted at Computer Associates, I fondly remembered a day over ten years ago when I overheard an amusing story about him. At least it was amusing to me. I didn’t have to work for him. I was working for ViewStar in… Read More »
I had been reading about Democracy Player as a cool new platform for Internet TV, so I thought I should check it out. I eventually got it working, but installing software shouldn’t be this hard. The problem is that as software packages get more and more complicated, developers need to rely on a lot of… Read More »
SoccerPhone is a speech application I wrote about five years ago so I could get live updates on Major League Soccer scores whenever I was away from an Internet connection. I wrote the application in VoiceXML, JavaScript, and Python. Since SoccerPhone gathers the live data by scraping information from the HTML scoreboard page on the… Read More »
Microsoft supposedly spent 18 months working on the 45 built-in system sounds for Vista. This may seem like a long time (and I guess it is), but I have yet to use an OS where I enabled the system sounds for any significant amount of time. It may not seem like a difficult task to… Read More »
Two engineers (Eric, a.k.a., Narf, and Jesús, a.k.a., Blanka) with whom I work at Voxify won a prize of nearly $14,000 from contributors at OnMac.net for being the first people to publicly get Windows XP running on an Intel-based Macintosh. I was kind of surprised when the Mac showed up in Jesus’s office a few… Read More »
I couldn’t resist upgrading to Firefox 1.5, even though I expected that some of the extensions I had installed would not be compatible. The extensions that are still enabled (or were added during the upgrade) include DOM Inspector, Talkback, Nuke Anything, AdBlock, FoxyTunes, Web Developer, Piggy Bank, View Rendered Source Chart, del.icio.us, Customize Google, ASCIItoUnicode,… Read More »
I haven’t posted about PhoneBlogger in quite a while, but I’m thinking about updating and enhancing some of the code. A lot has happened in the audio/phone blogging world since I announced PhoneBlogger January 9, 2003, and posted the PhoneBlogger source code on SourceForge. One new buzzword is mobcasting. The Wikipedia page on mobcasting quotes… Read More »
Via Boing Boing I found this NYT article on Life Hackers and interruptions. It’s an excellent update on efforts to reduce the deleterious impacts of interruptions on people who spend lots of time on computers trying to accomplish many things in a short period of time. Well, at least it’s an excellent update on what… Read More »