Richard Sprague WebLog
http://www.richardsprague.com
August 2005 - Posts
Life as a linguist
Thierry Fontenelle, one of the PMs in our group was interviewed by the editor of the Newsletter of the Association of Linguistics: http://www.ulg.ac.be/aglg/bulletin/n19/ig.pdf (oh wait, you better be able to read Belgian [sic] :-)) Anyway, we're very
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My brother in New Orleans
Ouch, I'm having a hard time getting as excited about work today. My brother Gary and his family live in a suburb of New Orleans, which of course was hit by a terrible hurricane. This photo (from Wikipedia ) is from the area near downtown that I know
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Dhulikhel Jaycees like our Nepali work
Our group does work to make new linguistic components for lots of new languages, including Nepali, so we were pleased to get an email from one of our vendors, Unlimited, who were honored for their work on the Nepali speller: Loosely translated, this means
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David Pogue loses his voice
Oops, David Pogue (the NY Times technology columnist who uses SR dictation software) lost his hard drive! All drives fail eventually and he was prepared with backups of all his important files, except he never backed up his Dragon Naturally Speaking trainiing
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Voice is pure communication
The Wall Street Journal [subscription required] Vonex LLC, a Brooklyn-based company working on a platform to make it easier for online gamers to use voice, is betting on demand for voice exploding. There are now 20 million online gamers in the world,
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SAPI 5.3
Don’t forget to look at Robert Brown’s post that describes the updated version of SAPI that will ship in Windows Vista.
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Data mining the Bible
The brains behind all that spell-checking, hyphenation, and other text-related work that happens inside Microsoft Word and other products comes from a little DLL done in my group. The technology behind all of it comes from the field of statistical language
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Testing BlogJet
Now that I’m vacation I hope to catch up on a few things, hopefully in a way that will ultimately save me time once I’m back at work. I love my blogs but I so far haven’t found an ideal way to post things, especially when I’m offline.
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Vacation
I'm here for a few days in Cannon Beach, Oregon with my family. There's this nice little Internet Cafe here where I can go on line early in the morning before my kids get up -- I love it! "What?! You're doing emails on vacation? You need to get a life!"
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Privacy and Google
We spend hours and hours discussing privacy issues around here, especially around new features we'd like to introduce that use Microsoft's "Watson" technology. Think of Watson as the engine behind those "consumer experience" options you get on a lot of
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Salaries at Microsoft
I heard from somebody who knows something about the salary structures at Amazon, and I found to my surprise that they don't appear to pay as well as Microsoft. Actually, maybe that's not surprising. We pay pretty well, especially when you consider a lot
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New jobs in Speech & Natural Language
It's been a busy week for me, trying to get things in place before I go to another one-week vacation . (it's kindda nice to take a 2-week vacation one week at a time, because I feel like I'm not terribly behind on my work). Our group has a lot going on,
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How May I Help You?
Lots of modern speech systems include some way to let the users say anything, and let the computer figure out what to do next. It's not really dictation, which is simply trying to understand and transcribe the exact words that were spoken. Instead, the
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Industrial Robotics with speech
Norberto Pires , from the Mechanical Engineering department at University of Coimbra in Portugal, has been working on an industrial robot that can be controlled through voice. He's doing everything in SAPI, with the Microsoft Mary voice, so it sounds
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Semantic speech
Until I joined this group last year, I hadn't touched SR since my brief stint at SRI International about 15 years ago. I was disappointed to find that in the intervening time very little had been done on using semantics, i.e. word meaning, as a way to
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Romania
Several of us will be at Interspeech in Lisbon the week of September 4th (more on that later), but now I just found out I have to go to Romania on my way back. It seems there are some speech people to talk with and that's where they'll be. Anybody know
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Another voice-to-text transcription service
Remember my investigations on Dictomail , the transcription service claiming to be automated, but which I concluded is mostly human? Well Patrick just pointed me to MyJotter , a service that does much the same thing but specifically claims not to be a
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No more H1-B Visas!?!?
From SJ Mercury Federal officials said Friday that all 65,000 of next fiscal year's H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers have been snapped up, the earliest that has ever happened. I heard about this in a message from our recruiters today and it's terrible!
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Back from vacation
I took my family to see Mount Ranier last week, and boy was it nice! The grandparents were in town, so my 3 little kids wore them out climbing up and down all the hiking trails. There was no Internet (or even cell phone coverage) where we went, so when
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Get started with speech programming
I'm too busy with management tasks all day to do any serious play with all the cool technology we have laying around here at Microsoft, but this week I'm going on vacation and hope to get in some recreational programming. I think I'll start with Matt
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Bill Gates comments on SR (from Vienna)
While doing an audio search on Yahoo this morning, I found this audio soundbite of Bill Gates commenting on speech recognition at a Q&A session in Vienna, Austria. This is about 18 months old, but it's a nice 1-minute summary of what Bill keeps telling
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Microsoft to integrate speech into Exchange
SpeechTek news is trickling in this week, including stories about how we plan to integrated speech into Exchange . Note that it's the policy of this blog to neither confirm nor deny products that haven't been launched.
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Virtual Earth hacks
Google Maps and Geobloggers gets all the attention, but take a look at these sites that use Virtual Earth's API: Using overlays to show hybrid layering between both satellite images and maps. Photobrowsin g to attach photos to a specific geographic location
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SR linked to drop in India outsourcing
Silicon India reports that hourly rates for business process outsourcing (BPO) have dropped significantly (up to 60%) since the glory days of 1999-2000: The impact has been particularly severe in voice-based processes where rates are down from $12-14
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