April 2006 - Posts

Off to Disneyland
Whew, this has been quite a busy week, and I'm getting out of here. I'm taking my family to Disneyland tomorrow and won't be back in the office for another week. We just finished a big review with Anoop Gupta, who runs Microsoft's Unified Communications Read More...
Posted 27 April 06 09:49 by sprague | 0 Comments   
Voicebox demo
I've mentioned Voicebox in the past, but now I see there's a video demonstration of their technology: Read More...
Posted 26 April 06 04:54 by sprague | 0 Comments   
Reviewing MS Dictation
Jarred Walton at Anandtech has posted perhaps the most thorough comparative review of Microsoft's Office 2003 Speech Recognition vs. DNS 8 that I've seen. He dissected the entire experience, reminding me of those anally-detailed digital cameras reviews Read More...
Posted 22 April 06 08:42 by sprague | 0 Comments   
Updated Treo software-- now I'm getting PUSHed
I've been enjoying my Treo 700W for about three months now, and I'm happy to report that it just got better. Verizon and Palm just released the updated 1.10 software that includes the Microsoft Messaging and Security (MSFP), that among other things updates Read More...
Posted 22 April 06 08:19 by sprague | 0 Comments   
I survived the China visit
The campus is pretty much back to normal today, after all the commotion over yesterday's visit by President Hu. I had some trouble getting back to my building after attending a weekly Office meeting across the street (and not far from the Home of the Read More...
Posted 19 April 06 12:12 by sprague | 3 Comments   
Chinese President at Microsoft
Several police cars followed me up highway 520 on the way to work this morning, but they weren't looking for speeders. Chinese President Hu Jintao is visiting today, so security on campus is very tight. We're fairly used to this, especially here in Building Read More...
Posted 18 April 06 08:44 by sprague | 0 Comments   
Inevitable Surprises
I wrote the details on my personal blog, but I recently read the 2003 book, Inevitable Surprises , by Peter Schwartz. I like predictions about the future, but this one is particularly interesting because the Peter Schwartz approach focuses on areas of Read More...
Posted 14 April 06 01:40 by sprague | 0 Comments   
Watch Research videos
Inside Microsoft, we're blessed with a daily banquet of interesting speakers who come to talk with us about issues of the day, ranging from technology (of course) to politics, to art and more. I've mentioned some of these talks previously (like the one Read More...
Posted 13 April 06 04:17 by sprague | 0 Comments   
SpeechTech Magazine on Speech Server 2007
SpeechTech Magazine published a nice summary of industry analysts' thoughts on last week's Speech Server roadmap announcement. All pretty positive comments, but heck, the only opinion we bloggers care about is Spykdog, who now likes us too ! Read More...
Posted 13 April 06 09:57 by sprague | 0 Comments   
New Academic search engine from Live.com
Check out http://academic.live.com for a search engine targeted at academic results. They say that the focus now is on Computer Science, Physics, and E.E., but I tried a few searches in linguistics and biology and it did quite well. Read More...
Posted 12 April 06 04:33 by sprague | 0 Comments   
VB2005 book download free from Microsoft
MSDN is offering a free download of the entire text of Introducing Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 for Developers. You may also want to get another free book, Upgrading to .Net , so you can learn how to run the SAPI 5.1 samples that are written in VB6. Read More...
Posted 12 April 06 06:35 by sprague | 0 Comments   
Castingwords and transcription
An article about CastingWords , from NY Times Another new idea comes from Amazon, whose Web Services group recently introduced a service called the Mechanical Turk, an homage to an 18th-century chess-playing machine that was actually governed by a hidden Read More...
Posted 11 April 06 12:26 by sprague | 1 Comments   
Why Vista won't suck
ExtremeTech has this review of reasons to be excited about Vista: How about some built-in speech recognition? That's right, Vista will include a built-in speech recognition engine, and new and improved speech synthesis. Assuming it works as well as it Read More...
Posted 10 April 06 06:06 by sprague | 3 Comments   
UW-Microsoft Symposium today
A bunch of us will be at Mary Gates Hall Room 241 from 3:30-5pm today at the University of Washington in Seattle for the monthly UW-Microsoft Symposium. Here's the session that looks interesting to me: A Search Engine for Natural Language Applications. Read More...
Posted 07 April 06 08:54 by sprague | 0 Comments   
Official Speech Server blog
A new blog from the Speech Server team, now featuring posts from several people, including Larry Ockene, who runs the engineering teams. I had trouble getting the RSS feed to work in my Bloglines aggregator, but the atom one works fine. Read More...
Posted 06 April 06 03:23 by sprague | 0 Comments   
Speech Server 2007
The Speech Server team today announced the next version, Microsoft Speech Server 2007, with a Beta available next month. There are two big pieces of news: native support for VOIP (very cool!), and lots more development options, including .Net and VoiceXML. Read More...
Posted 05 April 06 09:54 by sprague | 3 Comments   
Podcast me
Francis Shanahan has a new SAPI-powered web application that creates and streams a TTS Podcast from any RSS stream . So now you can subscribe to my blog in podcast format, then listen on your MP3 player. It uses the robot-sounding Microsoft Sam voice, Read More...
Posted 04 April 06 07:08 by sprague | 2 Comments   
Big Speech Server announcement tomorrow
Oh boy, you absolutely must check out http://www.microsoft.com/speech and our blogs tomorrow to hear the big announcement from the Microsoft Speech Server team. Read More...
Posted 04 April 06 06:57 by sprague | 3 Comments   
Another voice-controlled media remote
http://www.myvoco.com is another company with a voice-controlled remote control product. I haven't used them (yet) but I definitely want to keep track of these guys and learn more. Read More...
Posted 03 April 06 02:13 by sprague | 0 Comments   
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