It's true! the new Windows Vista includes a brand new speech recognition engine built in. The first beta is out today, so expect to hear more over the coming weeks as our first beta users begin to provide feedback (like this screenshot from Paul Thurrott...

An interesting piece on KUOW yesterday morning ( transcript and audio (3 min)) about research at U-W and Portland State on regional accents. To NW speakers, the vowels are the same in "odd" and "ought". Natives often drop the ending -ed, saying...

For what it’s worth, the news of Kai-Fu Lee’s departure was as much of a shock to us as to anyone else. The last time we talked to him, he said he was going on sabbatical to write a book (in Chinese only) about “realizing your potential”. He said he’d...

Jeremy Wagstaff is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, whose article today is titled “ Speaking Up for Voice Recognition” . The gist is that SR is good at what it does, but is still a niche (and may always be). He adds this: “NaturallySpeaking...

As Robert notes, we are running a survey of SAPI developers, so we can find out how make and promote our desktop speech API. Here are the details: Attention SAPI developers! The SAPI team at Microsoft wants to know what you think about our Speech...

Here are a bunch of new Knowledge Base articles about Microsoft Speech Server: NEW 841388 - BUG: A "no" answer is falsely recognized when you first answer "yes" to the question "Any extension" in Speech Software Development Kit NEW 899311 - You...

We recently released a new member of our free speech utility package. BuildAppLex.exe is a command-line tool that lets you create an Application Lexicon, using the Speech API. It takes one required command-line argument: a text file containing a list...

Okay, just because I have been posting erratically for the past month or two, don't think not much has been happening. We had a big overhaul of the MSDN blog site in April, and it screwed up my carefully-honed posting system and I never quite recovered...

By now most people know that stories about the origin of the QWERTY layout are a myth, exposed a few years ago by S. J. LIEBOWITZ and STEPHEN E. MARGOLIS. Many economists pointed to QWERTY as an example of the idea of "path dependence", attempting to...