Next week October 23-25 I will be in Phoenix for the ScanSoft/Nuance Conversations 2005 conference. ScanSoft formally changed their name to Nuance yesterday. During most of the time the Solutions Showcase area is open, you’ll be able to find me in the Voxify booth. If you’re also going to be at the conference, please stop… Read More: Nuance Conversations »
Many months ago, IBM announced that they were open sourcing and donating their Reusable Dialog Components library to the Jakarta project at the Apache Software Foundation. Finally, version 1.0 of the RDC has been released. The RDC is a JSP tag library that simplifies the development of server side code for generating VoiceXML documents for… Read More: Reusable Dialog Components »
It’s been ages since I’ve written about Soccerphone, or even about anything at all. The last few weeks have just been too hectic. But, I did find time this weekend to make a few updates to Soccerphone, which is an automated speech application I built a few years ago so I could receive live Major… Read More: Soccerphone Update »
Like most technical specialties, the speech applications industry has a large number of official standards. Fortunately, many of these standards are widely implemented. The implementations aren’t perfectly consistent, of course, but they’re close enough that at Voxify we’ve been able to get our speech applications platform to run on different VoiceXML browsers and ASR and… Read More: Speech Standards »
VoiceXML Review used to regularly publish interesting articles and news updates related to VoiceXML, but had fallen somewhat silent over the last six months or so. A lot has been going on with respect to VXML 2.1 and 3.0, so I’ve been hoping to see some more activity on the site. It’s good to see… Read More: New Articles at VoiceXML Review »
My main experience with XML-based programming languages has been with VoiceXML. One nice advantage of an XML-based language is that the syntax checker is essentially free, assuming the language provides a DTD, or preferably a Schema. Of course, most language compilers and interpreters also come with a syntax checker, so the DTD/Schema advantage is primarily… Read More: XML-Based Programming Languages »
A great article on Voxify appeared in the East Bay Business Times this week. In addition to providing some interesting background on the company founders, page three of the article provides a good description of what we do. In short, we design and build speech recognition applications that enable automated customer service solutions for clients… Read More: Voxify in the East Bay Business Times »
A beta version of Sphinx-4, an open source speech recognition engine implemented in Java, was recently released. Sphinx development is centered out of Carnegie-Mellon University, with major contributions from employees at Sun, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, and HP and smaller contributions from individuals at UC Santa Cruz and MIT. Ideas that are unlikely to come… Read More: Sphinx-4 Beta »
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: IBM Opens Speech Code »
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.