Richard Sprague WebLog : March 2006

March 2006 - Posts

Student interns wanted!: If you read my blog, or the rest of our blogs regularly, you may be interested, or know somebody else who is interested in working with us this Summer. We still have a few slots open for student interns for the Speech & Natural Language group. If you Read More...
Posted 31 March 06 03:47 by sprague | 0 Comments
How does SR help customer satisfaction: The amount of money you spend on customer service investments, like phone/email/IVR support, doesn't do much to help customer satisfaction, according to a report by Zachary McGeary , from Jupiter Research. He also notes that 80% of the customer service Read More...
Posted 31 March 06 03:18 by sprague | 1 Comments
Comments are back!: Oops, I can't believe for the past several months I haven't noticed all the comments that people submitted to this blog. The MSDN people changed the comment review process a while back and I never got around to learning how it works. Usually I get an Read More...
Posted 28 March 06 08:24 by sprague | 0 Comments
Traffic reports with speech: My home on Mercer Island is about 13 miles from the Microsoft offices, but getting there can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, depending on what the traffic happens to be for the evening. Fortunately I have a couple of alternate routes in case Read More...
Posted 27 March 06 04:19 by sprague | 0 Comments
Spelling correction in PubMed: One of my hobbies is bioinformatics and the cool ways computers can help with understanding biology, so I was intrigued when I saw this notice from the CLIP Colloquium, announcing a talk by John Wilbur at the National Library of Medicine: Spelling Correction Read More...
Posted 27 March 06 02:53 by sprague | 0 Comments
Science in the year 2020: Microsoft Research sponsored a special issue of the science journal Nature, titled Toward 2020 Science , with a bunch of contributors speculating on how computing will affect science in the next 15 years. Read More...
Posted 23 March 06 08:30 by sprague | 0 Comments
What's special about 2007 Office and Vista?: Bill says: "We've made Office backwards-compatible so you don't need Vista to run it. But there are a lot of features in Office 2007 that can really take advantage of the Vista experience." like, for example, speech? I am using SR now on 2007 Word on Read More...
Posted 22 March 06 08:43 by sprague | 2 Comments
Speech Server book: I forgot to mention this when I learned about it several weeks ago, but Sara Morgan Rea has written a book that includes information about Speech Server development. Building Intelligent .Net Applications was reviewed on Slashdot last month. At Microsoft Read More...
Posted 17 March 06 08:07 by sprague | 0 Comments
GotSpeech.Net: Oh boy, gotta take a look at this new site: http://gotspeech.net/default.aspx "The online community for Speech Server developers" Read More...
Posted 16 March 06 05:18 by sprague | 1 Comments
How to transcribe any audio on your PC: Chris Pratley asked me if there is an easy way to transcribe the audio in a OneNote recording. Well there is, though it depends a little on your computer's audio configuration, and you won't necessarily --okay, you probably won't -- get great recognition Read More...
Posted 16 March 06 04:40 by sprague | 10 Comments
Scoble and Frank Seide: Scoble dropped by again, this time to see the new demos from Frank Seide, who is visiting from MSRA. Frank’s projects all try to turn speech into a first-class data type that can be manipulated the way you’d expect for data. With text, for example, you Read More...
Posted 16 March 06 06:32 by sprague | 1 Comments
Mel Levine says schools are for linguists: Mel Levine, the pediatrician and author who founded All Kinds of Minds is speaking to Mercer Island teachers and administrators today. I went to his talk last night, and one of the things he said is that the trouble with schools is that they're designed Read More...
Posted 15 March 06 11:13 by sprague | 0 Comments
Voicebox on Discovery Channel: Our friends at Voicebox are featured in a Discovery Channel video that gives a nice overview of the types of things you'll do when SR is perfect. Many of the examples are impressive, like the in-car scenarios for changing radio stations. You have to be Read More...
Posted 14 March 06 12:40 by sprague | 3 Comments
Thinking of a startup?: Microsoft has a web site for startups. Featuring articles and contact information from the Emerging Business Team. How cool that must be to wander the world looking for interesting startups! Read More...
Posted 06 March 06 09:52 by sprague | 3 Comments
Get your flu shot: Lots of people have been sick lately. Today Andrea called in sick with flu. Last week it was Megan. What do they have in common? None of them got flu shots. Microsoft offers free flu shots to all employees, and thankfully I got mine the first day they Read More...
Posted 06 March 06 09:49 by sprague | 1 Comments
Why Linguists should be banned from the Internet: Sesame Street translated to Klingon. [via Grady Brooch ] Read More...
Posted 03 March 06 01:13 by sprague | 0 Comments
Better TTS using LPC: Our MSR people are excited about the LPC-based TTS systems like the one developed by Keiichi Tokuda at Nagoya Institute of Technology. The basic idea is to apply HMM to predict the spectral trajectory a sound makes, and do it at run-time based on a voice Read More...
Posted 03 March 06 08:02 by sprague | 0 Comments
Email is overrated: Jonathan Grudin is a researcher from MSR who spoke today at our annual TechFest. Microsoft did an analysis of employee blogging and he talked a little about the results, but I confess I didn’t really pay attention to that part of the talk. More interesting Read More...
Posted 01 March 06 09:42 by sprague | 1 Comments
Video Demo of Vista Speech Recognition: Chris Henley's blog has a must-see 15-min video of Windows Vista speech recognition in action. He did a very professional screen capture of a session that walks through SR on Vista, from how to set it up to how to browse the Internet using only voice Read More...
Posted 01 March 06 04:29 by sprague | 0 Comments

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March 2006 - Posts

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