I just read about a new site called Utterz that goes far beyond what I did with PhoneBlogger a little over four years ago. A couple of other voice blogging by phone sites have cropped up in the intervening years, but their feature sets were generally the same or only slightly better than what I… Read More »
Earlier this week Voxify announced a $15 million funding round that was led by a new investor, Intel Capital. This is pretty exciting news for us, as it allows us to accelerate some internal investments that will broaden the scope of the speech applications we currently deliver. One area we’ve been focusing on is making… Read More »
AVIOS is having their second speech app building contest for student teams. “Cash and/or equipment prizes valued at over $1000 will be awarded to teams of student programmers who design and create applications judged by industry experts to be the most robust, useful, creative, innovative, and user friendly.” The finished application must be submitted by… Read More »
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 »
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 »
Today WSJ Online had a half decent article on speech recognition. The writer provided reasonable coverage of the field, without being too negative. Microsoft continues to help out the whole field by drawing more attention to speech recognition. While Microsoft hasn’t invested quite as much into promoting speech recognition as I had hoped after the… Read More »
In response to the notification from Avaya that my personally identifiable information may have been compromised, I decided to try the automated phone systems used by Equifax, Experian and TransUnion for adding a fraud alert to my credit file. All three automated DTMF/voice applications were pretty bad. Equifax The app used two significantly different male… Read More »
Microsoft recently announced that Speech Server 2007 will provide support for speech applications written in VoiceXML. In order to penetrate the enterprise market for speech applications, Microsoft really had no choice. SALT-based applications remain as rare as hen’s teeth in the enterprise. Ok, maybe not that rare, but certainly the number pales in comparison to… Read More »
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 »
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 »