Microsoft Acquisition of Unveil Technology
This is a cool addition to Microsoft's suite of speech technologies.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/oct05/10-06UnveilTechPR.mspx
Unveil's approach to authoring and tuning grammars is data-driven. Rather than having a developer hand-craft a grammar from sentences out-of-the-blue, they take example sentences (e.g. from transcripts of call-centre conversations) categorize them in terms of the concepts that they represent, and train a statistical language model (SLM) and classifier on that data. This means that not only are grammars more likely to be robust out-of-the-box (given a reasonable amount of data), but also that grammar developers never need to understand SRGS or other formats, nor manage complex hand-written grammars.
Yes, the core technology pieces have been around for a while (they generally underlie "How May I Help You" systems) but training and testing SLMs and classifiers is hard. What Unveil did was to make it easy and useful to their customers.
Not only that, but the Unveil platform had an automatic feedback loop built in -- its Agent Assist technology was used not only for manual assistance of callers in difficulty 'behind the scenes' (the caller never need know an agent was involved), but also to retrain the underlying models, based on the assistance provided by the agent. This kind of closed-loop training is a nice example of automated tuning and a great fit for Speech Server.
And if that weren't enough, the former Unveil employees who are now working for Microsoft are damn smart and fab to work with.
I haven't seen much news/blog traffic on these technologies nor the acquisition -- please feel free to leave comments, questions and pointers here.
