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Friday, February 15, 2008 6:09 PM

Win big with an accessible user interface design (and save the planet)

If you're a student with cool ideas about accessible user interfaces - using speech recognition or synthesis, for example - consider the special award at the Imagine Cup . At this year's competition, Microsoft is calling on young programmers, artists
Posted by Stephen Potter | 2 Comments
Monday, December 31, 2007 12:45 PM

What a year for speech recognition at Microsoft

Yeah, yeah, the year in review, what a crushingly unoriginal idea for a post. But wait - this is worth it. 2007 was a huge year for speech recognition products at Microsoft. I think we'll look back on it as a real turning point. Here's how it shaped up.
Posted by Stephen Potter | 2 Comments
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 7:02 PM

Getting attached

According to a report in the Seattle Times yesterday, 21 out of 30 serious users of the Roomba vacuum-cleaning robot give their machine a name. More than half assign it a gender (male) and others have been known to dress it up. What kind of human-machine
Posted by Stephen Potter | 5 Comments
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Thursday, August 30, 2007 6:35 PM

Extracting session audio from OCS 2007 Speech Server logs

The ability to extract the audio for an entire call (both prompts and recognitions) from the Speech Server 2007 logs is a really useful feature for a number of analysis and tuning scenarios. Since the topic has surfaced a few times on the Beta newsgroups,
Posted by Stephen Potter | 2 Comments
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Thursday, August 30, 2007 6:07 PM

Direct access to audio in the Speech Server 2007 database

Here is a sample program that illustrates the principle of extracting a single audio file from the audio tables of an OCS 2007 Speech Server log database. This sample is governed by the Microsoft Permissive License as defined at http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/licensingbasics/permissivelicense.mspx
Posted by Stephen Potter | 2 Comments
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Attachment(s): Program.cs
Wednesday, August 15, 2007 6:02 PM

Bored medical student impressed by speech recognition

Sullen student, bored by x-rays of terrible chest diseases, is mesmerised by speech recognition , mutters that's so cool . Can't argue with that. (And can't resist real stories with a whiff of The Onion .)
Posted by Stephen Potter | 1 Comments
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Wednesday, August 01, 2007 6:50 PM

Thinking aloud

Speech recognition in Vista works well for me. Dictation accuracy is very high - especially since I flicked the switch to train it on my emails and documents - and the correction experience is smooth and efficient. But I hardly use it. I find it very
Posted by Stephen Potter | 3 Comments
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Tuesday, June 12, 2007 5:45 PM

How to punish a speech recognition system

We've all had frustrating experiences with speech recognition systems, and as a race we're not beyond punishing virtual beings the same way we would punish people. So, what to do when that voicebot won't behave? Teach it a lesson! Here are some tips on
Posted by Stephen Potter | 6 Comments
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Thursday, May 31, 2007 6:29 PM

The noise of email

I've just switched groups at Microsoft, and for the first few days it felt strangely quiet in my new office. The acoustic background hadn't changed much: I could hear voices in the offices nearby, people still passed by in the hallway chatting (some stopped
Posted by Stephen Potter | 3 Comments
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Friday, May 04, 2007 2:06 PM

Speech recognition in 1968

Respect your elders - here's a video of the state of the art of speech recognition research at Stanford in 1968. I thought it was a hoax at first, with the synth music and the board titles, the fuzzy waveforms, and somebody actually acting out "I scream"
Posted by Stephen Potter | 0 Comments
Friday, April 06, 2007 10:43 AM

Goodbye Karen

Sad news from Cambridge this week- Karen Spärck Jones has died, aged 71. I took her classes on NL systems in my M.Phil,, and she was the advisor on my thesis (a text generation program to describe images). Karen was active in developing real systems since
Posted by Stephen Potter | 1 Comments
Monday, March 26, 2007 1:16 PM

Speech Server 2007 Public Beta available

(Tap-tap. Is this working? OK. Hh-hmm.) We have shipped the Speech Server 2007 Public Beta! It's available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4F4D3AA4-8223-406C-B74F-DB2DE928D8B2 Since Speech Server is now technically part
Posted by Stephen Potter | 1 Comments
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Friday, March 16, 2007 6:17 PM

The importance of your call

Continuing an irreverent dictionary of voicebot vocabulary: yourcallisimportanttous , cl. Obsequious attempt to make the caller feel better about a dud place in the cattle queue. Actually means the opposite. Often followed by pleasestayontheline and yourcallwillbehandledshortly
Posted by Stephen Potter | 0 Comments
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Wednesday, March 14, 2007 8:00 PM

Investing in voice

Big time ! This kind of brainpower and expertise, on this kind of scale... the future is here. Welcome, Tellme!
Posted by Stephen Potter | 1 Comments
Monday, March 05, 2007 5:23 PM

Decomposition

Reading Nicholas Carr's dissection of the blogosphere this morning as "a vast, earth-engirdling digestive track, breaking down the news of the day into ever finer particles of meaning (and ever more concentrated toxins)" I am inspired to do my bit as
Posted by Stephen Potter | 1 Comments
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