Last week I attended Aculab's ACE conference and participated in a panel discussion. It was a useful trip. I spent time learning about Aculab's VoIP plans and their Prosody products.

Prior to the panel discussion I had a wide-ranging conversation with Judith Markowitz ranging from Speaker Verification(SIV) methods and the VoiceXML forum's SIV planning currently underway. We also discussed the impact of poor application design's impact on speech recognition. And finally ended with classical music and TTS voices singing Frere Jacque; it sounds amazing!

The singing TTS is really fascinating. As some may know part of my distant history was as a professional musician. What is really interesting for me is how prosody would change with singing. The way a musician would shape their mouth to get the right sound would change the phonemes. The phrasing of the music would also change, of couse, the basic prosody. Finally, the lack of breathing is very obvious in the clip I heard. I'm not a linguist or  physiologist but I imagine that the consistent air pressure, the volume of the air, the sound volume and the remaining volume of air would really change what we hear. Additionally I hypothesize that a TTS engine would have to make significant changes to handle a realistic synthetic singing voice. A fascinating problem. One other thought: music tuning changes based on the chordal structure of the music -- this I imagine would change the sound of each phoneme as well.

Finally, I participated in a panel discussion, led by Judith Markowitz, with Loquendo, Syntellect, Nuance, and Pronexus. The topic was “Let’s talk about speech” and Judith began with a presentation using the Gartner hype curve and giving her viewpoints on where each of the speech technologies were on that curve. She identified drivers (digitalization of telco networks, customer sat, and growth of the call center), what standards she saw as required (MRCP, SALT and VoiceXML) for platform evaluation and her perspective on Speak Verification and its importance.

Customers had great questions from langauges supported, why MSS chose to support VoiceXML, the value proposition of VoIP, IVR pricing pressures and many others. Thank you to the audience who asked insightful questions.

Cheers!
Chris