Richard Sprague WebLog : October 2005

October 2005 - Posts

DNS and Microsoft: Scott Weinstein has some advice for Nuance and their Dragon Naturally Speaking business and he notes some of the ways Microsoft tries to be open and responsive. He mentions several of our blogs, but let me add another: http://www.microsoft.com/speech/community/ Read More...
Posted 30 October 05 08:26 by sprague | 0 Comments
English spelling reform: Thierry Fontenelle writes about French spelling reform, and how our work on the Office speller paid off with an award-winning implementation that's being recognized as much better than anything out there from Openoffice. But what about U.S. and English Read More...
Posted 29 October 05 05:28 by sprague | 0 Comments
New Microsoft Health blog: Dr. Bill Crounse is our friend from the Microsoft Health and Life Sciences team and he has started a new blog . We love the idea of using speech for medical dictation, so be sure to visit his blog and send him comments on how you use SR in medicine. Read More...
Posted 25 October 05 12:25 by sprague | 1 Comments
Speech Presentation at PDC: See Video: The speech team's PDC presentation is now available on streaming video. Robert Brown, Philipp Schmid, and Steve Chang presented Ten Amazing Ways to Speech-Enable Your Application and those of you who couldn't attend PDC can watch it from the comfort of Read More...
Posted 25 October 05 11:49 by sprague | 1 Comments
Survey of SR businesses (Call Center Magazine): Call Center Magazine has a survey of SR and SR businesses . The one factor that has changed very little is the speech recognition engine itself. While vendors have tweaked their speech engines to make them work more efficiently and reliably, they havent Read More...
Posted 20 October 05 05:21 by sprague | 0 Comments
Using TabletPC: CNET quotes an IDC study that claims 9.7 million TabletPCs will ship in 2008, a torrid growth rate over the 1.2M expected to ship this year. That fact, plus my recent need to spend more time with our TabletPC division (we're doing a lot with them), means Read More...
Posted 20 October 05 02:44 by sprague | 1 Comments
Boston Globe rant against VR software: This morning we've been passing around references to that Boston Globe opinion article titled "Virtually Annoying". It's by Robert Kutner and appeared over the weekend in their Op-Ed pages. It concludes: [I]n the service economy, virtual humans are still Read More...
Posted 17 October 05 06:05 by sprague | 0 Comments
Clicks in Basque (or Amharic): Andy Abbar gets quoted in an article about the Local Language Program . We work with Andy, especially on some of the more obscure languages. He's famous at Microsoft for being the guy who travels to very exotic places to help figure out which languages Read More...
Posted 14 October 05 10:15 by sprague | 1 Comments
Ray Kurzweil and The Singularity: Ray Kurzweil came to Microsoft yesterday to give a talk and to promote his new book. He is one of the original commercial speech guys, so several of the old-timers here know him personally and a lot of us went to see him, especially people from Microsoft Read More...
Posted 12 October 05 07:24 by sprague | 1 Comments
Microsoft TV: I worked in the MSTV division for many years before I moved to Redmond last year to join the speech & natural language group, so I'm a big fan of their products and I always cheer for their business. That's why it's encouraging to get positive press like Read More...
Posted 11 October 05 03:27 by sprague | 0 Comments
Natural Language blogging: The speech group merged with the Microsoft natural language group earlier this year, putting all the linguists and other language-related people under one roof. I haven't blogged about it as much as I'd like, partly because (like everything about this Read More...
Posted 10 October 05 09:28 by sprague | 0 Comments
Free directory assistance calls with 1-800-free411: Dial 1-800-Free411 to get free directory assistance. I just tried it and it works. How? Apparently they are using SR to narrow the search space as much as possible, and a human kicks in if they can't figure out what you said. I tried saying "Mercer Island, Read More...
Posted 09 October 05 04:13 by sprague | 0 Comments
Unveil and Speech Server: We just announced a big acquisition of technology Unveil Technologies and Microsoft Corporation. They have a cool learn-by-example feature that we've been interested in for a while. We're also hiring a bunch of their engineers, which is always the best Read More...
Posted 06 October 05 06:04 by sprague | 0 Comments
Speech Reco on NPR: Listen to today's Morning Edition on NPR for a nice summary of the current state of speech recognition, including a number of comments from David Pogue, famous SR user and technology columnist at the New York Times. The segment includes several quotes Read More...
Posted 03 October 05 12:36 by sprague | 1 Comments
life@microsoft.com: Scott Heron at Herodios.com compiles a list of how to pronounce email addresses in other languages. I think it's cute that he includes a reference to the (now-)obscure programming language Forth, which I used to program many years ago. Also reviewed in Read More...
Posted 02 October 05 06:59 by sprague | 0 Comments

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