Welcome to my MSDN Blog.

I am a Group Program Manager in the Microsoft Speech and Natural Language group (SNL), so much of what you’ll see here is relevant to anyone interested in speech recognition and Microsoft’s products that recognize speech, including the Microsoft Speech Server. My group also does natural language technologies, especially the proofing and text analysis tools that ship with Microsoft Office and run behind the scenes in numerous other products including Windows.

I have been a Microsoft employee since the start-up where I used to work, WebTV Networks, was acquired in 1997.  WebTV slowly reorganized into Microsoft TV, and I was in charge of the professional services group there (we called it “Deployment Engineering”) until I decided to leave Silicon Valley and move here to Redmond in early 2004.

You may also be interested in my other, non-Microsoft specific blogs:

• Richard Sprague Blog: An assortment of news, information, and ideas that are of general interest to me.
• Richard Sprague Links (Bloglines): an on-going view into the Internet links I read.  
•  Ensembio: News and ideas specifically related to biology, particularly the emerging industry of what I like to call “consumer biology”, biotech products and services that are quickly becoming part of our daily lives.

Like all MSDN blogs, this one can be syndicated using its RSS feed, which makes it easy to watch the updates on an RSS reader such as SharpReader or Bloglines.