Richard Sprague WebLog : October 2006

October 2006 - Posts

Home of the future: Terry Gold wants to build the Office of the Future , but if you want to see the Home of the Future, take a look at this exclusive tour on MSN Tech. Unfortunately none of the ideas are really all that radical, which makes me suspect little of it will actually Read More...
Posted 28 October 06 06:52 by sprague | 1 Comments
Call Center of the (near) future: The ACLU has this funny (well, sort of) ad describing what it will be like to order a pizza one of these days: http://www.adcritic.com/interactive/view.php?id=59 There's a human in the loop, but I wonder if that helps or hurts the privacy aspects. I mean, Read More...
Posted 26 October 06 03:08 by sprague | 0 Comments
Vista TTS in China: China's SOHU.COM has coverage about the new Chinese voice ("Lily") in Vista: Loosely translated, I believe the article says Vista is the best thing ever and you should buy extra copies for your friends. Read More...
Posted 26 October 06 02:07 by sprague | 0 Comments
Speaking of Soapbox: I've been using YouTube since it first came out, but now I'm switching to Soapbox , Microsoft's new video tool. I just posted a new video of my flight on a hot air balloon during my trip to New Mexico last week. I like Soapbox better because the videos Read More...
Posted 24 October 06 08:22 by sprague | 0 Comments
Another speech-driven video: Rob points to the folks at videoscreencast.com who have put together another video (this one in Soapbox) showing how easy it is to use SR in Vista to make a movie using just your voice. This is another one like the one on istartedsomething.com , only Read More...
Posted 24 October 06 08:15 by sprague | 0 Comments
Links summary 10/30/2006: Microsoft (Europe) is hosting an EU Innovation Day . The speech group's own Miguel Dias will be there to talk about our Language Development Center. The first thing I thought of when I heard about Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) real -life struggle and Read More...
Posted 24 October 06 02:17 by sprague | 0 Comments
Help Microsoft user research: If you like to try cutting-edge product ideas, be sure to sign up for Microsoft Usability Research studies. Enter your name and contact info so the people from Usability can contact you about participating in trials of unreleased products. The usability Read More...
Posted 21 October 06 04:37 by sprague | 1 Comments
My Tablet and speech: Eric Yu sent an email asking me about the type of microphone setup I use on my Toshiba Tablet M200. I have posted previously about how to use speech on a tablet (type "Tablet mic" in the search box on my blog main page), but in brief, I don't do anything Read More...
Posted 19 October 06 11:35 by sprague | 0 Comments
I'm in New Mexico: It's my mother-in-law's birthday, and she wants to go on a balloon ride, so everyone in the family is meeting in New Mexico this week. Right now I'm in Santa Fe, going to Albequerque tomorrow. I'm also trying to help finish a big presentation we have Read More...
Posted 17 October 06 10:20 by sprague | 0 Comments
Open Source Speech Recognition: Slashdot has a discussion for how open source speech corpora can help in the development of new SR engines. Here's the excerpt: VoxForge collects free GPL Transcribed Speech Audio that can be used in the creation of Acoustic Models for use with Open Source Read More...
Posted 11 October 06 11:23 by sprague | 0 Comments
Frank Seide on Channel 9: Some people have been wondering what happened to that Scoble interview that Frank Seide (from MSRA) did a while back . Well, that particular video is still unpublished but you can get an idea of what Frank has been up to by looking at another Channel9 Read More...
Posted 10 October 06 06:22 by sprague | 1 Comments
What we do all day: Today's New York Times has a nice article about all the work that goes into fixing those last few bugs on Windows and Office. You can't quite see Mike Tiano in that top photo of Vista Ship Room, but he's there someplace. In fact he's there right now as Read More...
Posted 09 October 06 07:42 by sprague | 0 Comments
Misc links of the week: Keith sent us this link to a strong key generator from Kingsley-Hughes.Com . Use it to give ideas for strong passwords, like those our domain requires us to reset every month or two. Microsoft subscribes to Overdrive , a publisher of digital books including Read More...
Posted 09 October 06 12:22 by sprague | 0 Comments
Podcast lists: This weekend I listened to several podcasts while doing yardwork and other "dead time" in the car, etc. I grabbed these because I was in a hurry, they looked interesting, and I just wanted something on my playlist. David Shenk interview : he wrote a recent Read More...
Posted 08 October 06 06:20 by sprague | 0 Comments
Mike Cohen (Google) podcast: Spykdog introduced me to an interesting 15-min podcast interview with Mike Cohen , who runs speech recognition development at Google. The big trend recently in SR is in concept recognition like how-may-I-help-you systems, but these systems are most interesting Read More...
Posted 06 October 06 01:12 by sprague | 1 Comments
New York Times Reader: One cool Vista feature that hasn't been talked about enough is the built-in .Net Framework 3.0. What's even more cool is that it's also available for XP (through a separate download). To prove it, the team put together the New York Times Reader , a free Read More...
Posted 05 October 06 05:53 by sprague | 1 Comments
Stream computing and speech?: Patrick noticed this article in Information Week a few days ago: ATI, which is being acquired by AMD in a $5.4 billion deal, is designing a version of its graphic chip that can connect to AMD's popular Opteron processor via Coherent Hypertransport, AMD's Read More...
Posted 04 October 06 07:08 by sprague | 3 Comments
Speech Bot for Media Center: Casey Chesnut wrote a cool bot application for Speech Server that is getting some interest from the press. See the writeups in Slashgear , MAKE , and Engadget . It lets you program your Media Center over the phone or through an MSN Messenger window like Read More...
Posted 03 October 06 10:53 by sprague | 1 Comments
Screen capturing with SnagIt: I went to a presentation the other day where one of the PMs was showing off features of Speech Server using Powerpoint but in a fantastic interactive way: he had these screen shots all lined up one after another, with various parts of the screen highlighted Read More...
Posted 02 October 06 10:48 by sprague | 5 Comments
Podcast listening: During my 25-minute commute each day I almost always listen to recorded radio: NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered, both of which I record daily using Replay Radio . I run the Replay Radio client software on my TabletPC, which sits in the Read More...
Posted 01 October 06 08:30 by sprague | 6 Comments

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