Thank you all for coming to our Friday lunch session at the PDC! The large attendance was a pleasant surprise given the timing of our session.

Rob was first up. He demonstrated the new Speech User Experience in Windows Vista. Several times during his demo he got spontaneous applause from the audience :-). He demonstrated the new user interface and the free functionality that every application gets, including dictation (if their text fields use RichEdit 2.0 controls). The fact that Windows Vista ships with our latest speech recognition engine is a big plus for developers who no longer have to worry about how their users will get a competitive recognition engine on their machines.

I was next. I did some live coding demos of speech synthesis (including synthesizing to a file) and speech recognition. The demos worked w/o a problem (although my pressing the 'End' instead of the 'Page Down' button on the slide machine caused some confusion). I will be posting the code snippets from my demos on this blog over the next couple of weeks.

Finally Steve Chang from the Speech Server team showed off some of the prototype systems that they have built. Despite some tricky setup problems (coordinating phone line access with the room's speaker system) his demos went really well. It was very impressive to see both the multi-linguality of their platform and the ability of building working systems in matters of days, not weeks or months. And things will only get better ...

The ensuing Q & A session lasted for about 20 minutes (it helped that there was no talk scheduled in our room after us). I hope we were able to answer your questions. If you have any further questions (or have questions after viewing the online recording) feel free to post it to this blog.

- Philipp