Microsoft Speech Technology Bloggers
(Update 2006-05-31: added Walter and Aseef.)
They're on a lot of blogrolls, but who are these people and what do they actually do every day? Here's a quick overview of people who blog on speech and natural language technology at Microsoft and the kinds of discussions we can expect them to get into.
Official Microsoft Speech Server Blog
The MSS team has put together an "official" blog named You Talkin' to Me (RSS), which will host contributions from a variety of team members. "Engineering guy" Larry Ockene, who heads up product development, just posted on the next version of Speech Server (codenamed "Skagit").
Anandi Raman Creath
Anandi's a Program Manager in Microsoft Speech Server who's responsible, among other things, for our TAP -- Technology Adoption Program. She has posted many insider discussions of the program, on her site Anandi's Thoughts (RSS), along with some personal musings on life and working at Microsoft.
Chris Schindler
Program Manager in Speech Server. Chris's blog Speech Server Coffeehouse (RSS) has discussions and advice on VUI design. Chris was involved in an application that made a vital impact for thousands of people: Katrina Safe. This was adopted by the American Red Cross, and versions have subsequently been deployed to help people impacted by other serious disasters such as Hurricane Stan and the earthquakes in Pakistan.
Craig Fisher
Craig is a new Program Manager on Speech Server. His blog Craig's List (of Speech Server miscellany) (RSS) starts off with a helpful explanation of many speech and telephony related acronyms. Do you know what CPA is?
Derrick Coetzee
Derrick is a developer in the Speech Server group and his blog Developing for Developers gets deeply into software development theory and practice. A sample post: Derrick's Valentine's Day musings on automatic dependency tracking in builds.
Jay Waltmunson
Jay is a Program Manager in the Speech and Natural Language Group, and his blog Jay's blog on text-to-speech (RSS) is digest of news and happenings around TTS, both general and Microsoft-related. See his article on saving TTS output to .wav in C#.
Joe Calev
Joe's a tester in Speech Server, and his blog Joe Calev's Weblog (RSS) discusses aspects of his daily work and coding tips with the Speech Server SDK. Joe's also a seasoned traveller: see his recent posts -- 6 installments -- on travelling with small children...
Ken Circeo
Ken is lead technical writer for Speech Server, and his blog Ken Circeo: The View From Building 17 (RSS) has posts on his daily documentation work (see Making help helpful) as well as humorous posts on the Microsoft community, balloon rides, coffee, and other important matters.
Nilkund Aseef
Aseef is a developer working on the Speech Server dialog flow designer and project model. He recently started the blog Inside Microsoft Speech Server (RSS).
Phil Beber
Developer on the Speech Server team. Phil works on the logging code for MSS, and talks about it on his blog Blogging about Logging (bit of a poet, our Phil) (RSS). He's recently posted code samples and some advice about dynamic scripting.
Philipp Schmid
Philipp's a developer in the Speech and Natural Language group and is responsible for much of SAPI as we know it. Philipp's SpeechLead (RSS) blog has lots of posts from the recent PDC (Professional Developers Conference), and some sample code for a speech-enabled RSS reader.
Richard Sprague
Group Program Manager in the Speech and Natural Language group. Long-time and prolific blogger. The Sprague Weblog (RSS) has insights into Richard's daily work, and musings and help on the core recognition and NL technology as well as the industry at large.
Rob Chambers
Software Architect in the Natural UI team and very active blogger. Rob's blog Rob's Rhapsody (RSS) has details of his work with speech recognition in Windows Vista, and has questions, comments and discussions around all sorts of applications of speech technology. Rob's post about demoing to Bill Gates was picked up by the Seattle PI.
Robert Brown
Program Manager in the MSR Incubation group (formerly with SNL and Speech Server). Robert's blog All the cool developers use Speech APIs (RSS) has some discussions about developing speech applications, and he recently posted an acclaimed article about the forthcoming speech capabilities in Windows Vista.
Steve Chang
Steve's a Program Manager on the Speech Server team. His blog Making Speech Ubiquitous... and Less Annoying! (RSS) has thoughts on speech technologies, voice user interfaces, and linguistics, which is great, because that's its subtitle. Nice discussion on how the semantic faux pas '... fills a much needed void' is used with alarming frequency.
Walter Oliver
Long-time veteran of Microsoft and Program Manager in the Speech and Natural Language group, Walter is interested in practical applications of speech recognition. The focus of Walter's MSDN Blog (RSS) is "to promote the exchange of ideas about scenarios and technologies involving Speech Recognition in day-to-day workflows".
Honorary member: John Lawrence
John led the team that wrote the MSS 2004 Speech Application SDK and was one of the first speech bloggers at Microsoft. Although he's no longer in speech, John continues to blog as Development Manager for the Visual Studio Team System in his blog John Lawrence (MSFT) (RSS). And he's kept the speech team on his blogroll, bless him.
Stephen Potter
Well, that's me, Program Manager in the Speech Server team. My blog The Spoken Word (RSS) is intended to share news on Microsoft Speech Server and to discuss themes and trends on speech recognition and spoken dialog technology at large. Keep me on the straight and narrow: let me know if I'm not doing that...
A number of these blogs are syndicated through Microsoft Community Blogs service.
(2006-01-26: This article is an update of my post from November last year. Going forward, I'll be updating the information in this article.)
