Out of Portugal

Fil and I spent Friday at the Microsoft Portugal offices, basically meeting people and debriefing on our week at Interspeech. The MS-Portugal people are extremely friendly and helpful—no doubt because it’s a pretty small organization and they pretty much all know each other.

They do a lot of things differently than we do in Redmond. For example, most employees don’t have phones on their desks!  Instead of a fixed-line phone, everyone carries a mobile phone. Employees are issued two phone numbers: one for mobile and the other for “office” (which just gets forwarded to your mobile).

In Redmond we have an internal system we call MS-Connect, based on Speech Server, that lets you dial 0 and look up an employee using our automated attendent IVR system. There are something like 30,000 employees in the Pugent Sound area who are included in that directory, but it works real well, so you know there’s a heavy-duty grammar recognizer behind it.  Well, in Portugal they only have something like 250 employees, so I think it would be a cinch to build a Portuguese recognizer and fit up their office that way.  Now if only we could find some local people to help us build products in Portuguese…