We work closely with the team in MSR-Asia (also known as " The World's Hottest Computer Lab "), so we often say the word "Beijing" around here, but until yesterday I was pronouncing it incorrectly. The right way to pronounce it: Bay-Jing . Don't say Bay...

We are busy hiring for a bunch of new jobs in the Microsoft speech groups, and as a hiring manager I get resumes from a variety of places: Word of mouth: another manager or employee at Microsoft saw or knows a candidate, happens to remember my job opening...

Thanks to Ken for posting some more interesting information about TTS, including a link to NextUp.com , which nicely surveys several text-to-speech products. Note that Babel Technologies, which he references, is now Acapela Group , following the merger...

Robert Brown points to some speech utilities that you'll find useful if you develop speech apps. These utilities were designed for people who are buildilng telephony apps on Microsoft Speech Server, but you might find them useful if you're a SAPI-based...

One of the fun things about working in the speech and natural language group is getting access to all the tons of cool language data. Last week we just got a new data set called "Offensive Word List" and it's available in almost every language you can...

Some people are treating last week's Infoworld article about Microsoft Speech Server as bad news, but I disagree. The article quotes one company, Pronexus , as having been over-optimistic in its predictions for MSS sales, but oh-by-the-way is still...

From SpeechTek Magazine : ScanSoft Extends Worldwide Leadership in Speech Recognition Software According to Analyst Firm Preliminary Report According to Gartner, ScanSoft shipped approximately 43 percent of all speech recognition software ports worldwide...

Casey missed out on our announcement of the new Spanish and French versions of Speech Server and I feel bad because it looks like I never got around to posting the news. We're incredibly happy about the new beta language packs which you can download...