Joe Calev's WebLog

Part of the frustration of writing this blog is the fact that I have several interesting topics to blog about - several of which I'm sure you're interested in (see the comments in my recent "questions about UCAS" post) but I cannot blog at all about these...

So I must admit that even though speech recognition in Vista was created by one of our partner groups and I know several people that worked on it, I didn't actually try it until this weekend. Although I never installed any of the betas, I did pick up...

On Saturday, February 24th my grandmother finally succombed to old age and died from organ failure. Most likely as you read this I am already heading towards New York, where her funeral will be held. She was a very resolute and strong woman and will be...

Yesterday I wrote about how to create a grammar for a language for which we do not have a recognition engine. The post ended with a question on how to best approximate the phonemes for a target word. As I mentioned yesterday, my first attempts at approximation...

This is the first part of a two part post where I will tackle the problem of creating grammars in a target language for which no recognition engine exists. My goal was to create a simple GRXML grammar capable of recognizing a few phrases in Mandarin Chinese...

As new members of the Office Communications Server team, my team has been spending a lot of time lately learning about the OCS platform and all of the pieces and technologies that are part of it. Last week was spent reading through a number of RFCs on...

Many of you familiar with Microsoft Speech Server/Office Communications Server are likely aware that the preferred way to place outbound calls is through a message queue. I spent some time looking through our documentation and noticed that we have a decent...

Recently I have spent time reading the book, Branded Customer Service and discussing different experiences based on the book. The basic premise of the book is that you need to unify your brand marketing and brand deliverance. In other words, the brand...

OK, so I admit that most of my recent posts have not been Speech Server related, but since most of my ideas cannot be posted my mind has had time to wander. Yesterday I finished the very influential book - How to Win Friends and Influence People by...

Recently the GM of my group was interviewed at CRN . For those of you used to the MSS (Microsoft Speech Server) acronym we have been known as for awhile, we are now called the UCAS (Unified Communications Application Server) team, part of our further...

I really only have a handful of phrases that I live my life by. Some of these I read in books, while others I have found the hard way. Today, I am going to pass one of these on to address a mistake that I have seen too many people make in their lives...

As some of you may know, one of the new features with Speech Server 2007 within Office Communications Server is concept recognition. In this model, you create a grammar by providing training sentences for each possible answer and these are then compiled...

Based on a recent discussion between my three year old and a taxi driver in Bangkok, we have a long way to go towards creating speech applications capable of understanding young children. Taxi driver: (driving past where the king of Thailand currently...

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am working on rebuilding my foreign language vocabulary program to support a number of new features, with one of the key features being speech recognition. This poses a number of challenges, the primary challenge being...

Yesterday I wrote about my first impressions of the book Branded Customer Service and how I felt it applied to the two airlines I used on my trip to Thailand. A little more interesting, I will now discuss my opinion of how well I think we do this at Microsoft...

On the plane ride back from Thailand, I started reading Branded Customer Service by Janelle Barlow and Paul Stewart. Although I still have a good portion of the book before me, it has led me to look at things with a different viewpoint. My primary...

As some of you may know, foreign languages are a big hobby of mine. I currently can speak French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Italian and am slowly building up my Thai. I have already started learning some Arabic and Mandarin and hope to learn those...

Some time ago I wrote several posts on travelling with small children that were quite popular. Recently I had the chance to travel with our two year old and three year old for two and a half weeks to Thailand and I thought I would post some addenda to...