If you read my blog, or the rest of our blogs regularly, you may be interested, or know somebody else who is interested in working with us this Summer. We still have a few slots open for student interns for the Speech & Natural Language group. If you...

The amount of money you spend on customer service investments, like phone/email/IVR support, doesn't do much to help customer satisfaction, according to a report by Zachary McGeary , from Jupiter Research. He also notes that 80% of the customer service...

Oops, I can't believe for the past several months I haven't noticed all the comments that people submitted to this blog. The MSDN people changed the comment review process a while back and I never got around to learning how it works. Usually I get an...

My home on Mercer Island is about 13 miles from the Microsoft offices, but getting there can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, depending on what the traffic happens to be for the evening. Fortunately I have a couple of alternate routes in case...

One of my hobbies is bioinformatics and the cool ways computers can help with understanding biology, so I was intrigued when I saw this notice from the CLIP Colloquium, announcing a talk by John Wilbur at the National Library of Medicine: Spelling Correction...

Microsoft Research sponsored a special issue of the science journal Nature, titled Toward 2020 Science , with a bunch of contributors speculating on how computing will affect science in the next 15 years.

Bill says: "We've made Office backwards-compatible so you don't need Vista to run it. But there are a lot of features in Office 2007 that can really take advantage of the Vista experience." like, for example, speech? I am using SR now on 2007...

I forgot to mention this when I learned about it several weeks ago, but Sara Morgan Rea has written a book that includes information about Speech Server development. Building Intelligent .Net Applications was reviewed on Slashdot last month. At Microsoft...

Oh boy, gotta take a look at this new site: http://gotspeech.net/default.aspx "The online community for Speech Server developers"

Chris Pratley asked me if there is an easy way to transcribe the audio in a OneNote recording. Well there is, though it depends a little on your computer's audio configuration, and you won't necessarily --okay, you probably won't -- get great recognition...

Scoble dropped by again, this time to see the new demos from Frank Seide, who is visiting from MSRA. Frank’s projects all try to turn speech into a first-class data type that can be manipulated the way you’d expect for data. With text, for example, you...

Mel Levine, the pediatrician and author who founded All Kinds of Minds is speaking to Mercer Island teachers and administrators today. I went to his talk last night, and one of the things he said is that the trouble with schools is that they're designed...

Our friends at Voicebox are featured in a Discovery Channel video that gives a nice overview of the types of things you'll do when SR is perfect. Many of the examples are impressive, like the in-car scenarios for changing radio stations. You have to...

Microsoft has a web site for startups. Featuring articles and contact information from the Emerging Business Team. How cool that must be to wander the world looking for interesting startups!

Lots of people have been sick lately. Today Andrea called in sick with flu. Last week it was Megan. What do they have in common? None of them got flu shots. Microsoft offers free flu shots to all employees, and thankfully I got mine the first day they...

Sesame Street translated to Klingon. [via Grady Brooch ]

Our MSR people are excited about the LPC-based TTS systems like the one developed by Keiichi Tokuda at Nagoya Institute of Technology. The basic idea is to apply HMM to predict the spectral trajectory a sound makes, and do it at run-time based on a...

Jonathan Grudin is a researcher from MSR who spoke today at our annual TechFest. Microsoft did an analysis of employee blogging and he talked a little about the results, but I confess I didn’t really pay attention to that part of the talk. More interesting...

Chris Henley's blog has a must-see 15-min video of Windows Vista speech recognition in action. He did a very professional screen capture of a session that walks through SR on Vista, from how to set it up to how to browse the Internet using only voice...