All the Cool Developers use Speech APIs : Miscellanous

Cool Developers STILL use Speech APIs

Charles Oppermann — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 01:12:02 GMT

My apologies that there have been no new posts on this blog for nearly a year. Because my personal and professional lives have taken a new direction, my Microsoft blog will be closing.

I highly recommend the Speech @ Microsoft blog for more up-to-date information on Microsoft’s speech technologies.

Also, Rob’s Rhapsody is a good blog maintained by Microsoft’s Rob Chambers.

You can to email the Speech product team at Microsoft as well: listen@microsoft.com for speech recognition questions, and speak@microsoft.com for speech synthesis and Text-to-Speech (TTS) queries.

The best place for developers to get the Speech SDK samples and documentation is the Windows SDK. Download all or just part of it. You can email your SAPI related questions to sapitech@microsoft.com.

If you’re interested in contacting me personally, you can email me at chuckop@gmail.com or chuckop@live.com. Search the internet for Charles Oppermann OR ChuckOp and you’ll generally find me. I hope to hear from you!

Speech technology is incredibly enabling and is now mainstream and accepted by users. The technology is easily available to developers, so go forth and add the power of the human voice to your application!

Thank you,
Charles Oppermann
Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Bob, Windows 95, Internet Explorer 3.0, Active Accessibility, Internet Explorer 4.0/4.01, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows 2000 Active Directory Programming (author), Windows Vista, Office Communication Server 2007, Windows Speech Recognition Profile Tool, Windows 7

“A computer on every desk and in everyone home…
…usable by everyone!”

Cool Developers Go Flying

Charles Oppermann — Sun, 13 May 2007 11:24:48 GMT

Last week the speech team wrapped up a milestone of work and to celebrate I took up our group program manager Richard Sprague up for a quick tour of downtown Seattle, the Eastside area including Bill Gates' house and the main Microsoft campus in Redmond.

Richard took some video of the trip and posted the highlights on MSN's Soapbox video service:

Video: Flying over Seattle

Upgrading to Windows Vista

Charles Oppermann — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:23:12 GMT

I've personally found the upgrade process from Windows XP to Windows Vista to be seamless. However, I know that people have concerns about their software and devices working with a new version of the operating system.

In Windows Vista there is pro-active and reactive technology to help with compatibility issues, so I think compatibility problems will be not be as big a concern. However, with over 200 million users, there will be issues for some people. The best thing you can do is plan ahead.

Use the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor on your current machine to identify potential problem areas. In many cases where there is compatibility issues, there is already a new version available from the manufacturer. The upgrade advisor will link directly there where you can get the new version.

For technical folks, you can browse the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) and see the level of support available.

Now for a purely personal comment. In the past, I've found that software that doesn't work with newer versions of the operating system (not just Windows Vista), tend be of lower quality overall, or tend to perform tasks that require intertwining with the operating system. The days of allowing applications free rein to manipulate the file system and registry is over. Too many applications abused this and Windows has had to clamp down to prevent exploits.

Already have Windows Vista installed and are having problems? Here is some help.

Now, for Speech API developers, I'm happy to say that Windows Vista includes SAPI 5.3, which is backwards compatible with SAPI 5.1 that was included with Windows XP.

How NASA Can Help Microsoft

Charles Oppermann — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 21:46:36 GMT

On an internal blog at Microsoft, I came across a posting by a Corporate VP on some books he was going read while on vacation. One of the books was a autobiography of one of my hero's, Gene Kranz, who was Flight Director for several flights in Project Gemini and Apollo.

Kranz lead his team of Flight Controllers (known as the White Team) during two of the most dramatic events in the space program at the time; the touchdown of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, Eagle, and again when the Apollo 13 Service Module exploded.

Kranz's book is called Failure Is Not An Option and is wonderfully written and I recommend it highly. In my opinion, and echoed in the internal blog posting I read, the lessons of the space race of the late 1950's and 1960's are of value to any large organization. Kranz's management style is no-nonsense, and that constant practice through simulation kept everyone alert and allowed them to react quickly to unplanned situations.

Probably the worst thing in his Flight Control world was encountering a problem that wasn't already thought about. The idea being as anything went wrong, everyone has experience with the problem from simulation and could react very quickly. Absolutely there are numerous lessons for Microsoft in how NASA and it's contractors approached the space race to the Moon.

In this arena, anything could happen, so you assumed that from the start, planned for it, designed for it, and executed it with that in mind. Imagine a world in which software developers assume everything could fail and one in which simulation (testing) does fail everything. The result would be much more robust code.

I think Microsoft does more of this kind of testing than another major software maker. While software components, particular the interactions with the operating system platform are complex, the various systems of the Apollo missions where incredibly complex as well. There were several major companies and hundreds of small contractors providing pieces to the system and they all had to work together perfectly.

After reading his book, I got to meet Gene at a MoF dinner a few years ago. He's got a great personality and mentality for thinking through problems.

I also recommend Angle of Attack by Harrison Storms, who was a senior VP for North American Aerospace, personally responsible for Apollo Command Module. It too has lessons on how business can react to tragic failure (as what happened when the Apollo 1 command module caught fire during a ground test, killing three astronauts).

These are not business books, but biographies of head-strong people leading large organizations doing high-profile work.

Steve Wozniak at Microsoft

Charles Oppermann — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 05:35:00 GMT

One of the things I love about Microsoft is that you often get talk with, or listen to interesting people. Over the years, I got to shake hands with Steven Spielberg (wearing a Microsoft Bob baseball cap), Jay Leno (Windows 95 launch), Stevie Wonder (accessibility event), and just the other week, former NFL player Mike Utley. I just missed out on meeting Muhammad Ali once because I was heads down on shipping IE 4.01.

Today, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer came by the campus. "Woz" as his is commonly known, was a electronics geek in his teens and designed many little gadgets before Steve Jobs convinced him to sell his micro computer design that HP rejected. That became the Apple I in 1976.

Woz was giving a speech and signing copies of his book, "iWoz". He gave a well practicied, but informal talk about his early years of fiddling with electronic things and his early interactions with Steve Jobs.

Jobs and Woz considered themselves best friends, but in all the accounts of I've read of both men, they really couldn't be much different. Woz was grounded and knew he wanted to be an engineer, while Jobs was a free spririt. In his talk, he didn't dispell that image. Woz describes Jobs as having a lot of strange friends, doing strange things, and being a "free thinker" several times. It makes me wonder what they saw in each other in the first place.

In all, a nice talk by Steve.

UPDATE on Monday, October 9, 2006: Port 25 has a video interview with Woz on the day he visited.

UPDATE on Monday, October 9, 2006: Reworded portion on Apple I for clarity. Thanks Josh.