It's official: the Microsoft Speech Deal of All Time:  we announced that Tellme is now a part of Microsoft. My boss is in Mountain View today to meet the new people.

You'll hear a lot more about this in the next few weeks.  And meanwhile, I'm not the official voice of Microsoft on this, so everything I say should be taken as my own personal opinion (and plenty of people are expressing their opinions).

But here's briefly what I think: Data is what drives speech recognition, and Tellme has it by the truckful.  It's extremely important in speech to get actual users using your system, because every call and every interaction is new data that will improve quality and accuracy.  A significant fraction of the U.S. population has called Tellme, which is an asset that will mean huge improvements to all of our systems.

I'm also looking forward to working with the people I know from my old days in Silicon Valley.  Their offices are just down the street from my old neighborhood, so I get misty-eyed just thinking about Silicon Valley and all the fun things they do down there.  Turns out there are several ex-Microsoft people there too, which should help in the transition because it means they already have a lot of the same DNA.

update: I keep mistakenly spelling 'Tellme' incorrectly with an inserted capital M, so I edited this post to use the correct orthography.