March 2007 - Posts

Our doctor makes housecalls
Reason # 6,384,289,121 to work at Microsoft: our healthcare includes free home visits by a doctor . We tried this today when my daughter had a scrape that seemed infected. One call to a special 24-hour number and an hour later a doctor was at our house. Read More...
Posted 25 March 07 03:33 by sprague | 2 Comments   
Emerging Technology Conference
Looks like I'm going to the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference next week in San Diego. The theme of the conference is "magic", as in Arthur C. Clarke's famous saying about how sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from it. We had Read More...
Posted 22 March 07 09:46 by sprague | 1 Comments   
SR video from TechFest
Robert Scoble uploaded a PodTech video of his visit to Techfest earlier this month . Be sure to look at two sections: 34:04: Speech recognition for podcasts. 36:50: Frank Seide shows video exploration and discovery for Media Center PCs. Read More...
Posted 21 March 07 07:40 by sprague | 0 Comments   
What Tellme Employees think about iPhone
Hey, do Tellme employees agree with me about iPhone? Here's a video posted to Youtube's tellmezone : Like they say, "any phone can do that" Read More...
Posted 20 March 07 05:19 by sprague | 3 Comments   
ResponsePoint
Our old boss, XD Huang (yes, the author of the famous text on SR ) has been hard at work the past few years on a new product, ResponsePoint , which was announced today . It's an IP phone designed for small businesses. Yes, it includes voice-activated Read More...
Posted 19 March 07 04:23 by sprague | 2 Comments   
Array Microphones
Microsoft Research’s annual Techfest is the one of the busiest times of the year for my friends in MSR, who spend months building some the most amazing demos you can imagine. Some of our speech friends there, like Ivan Tashev and Mike Seltzer were featured Read More...
Posted 15 March 07 04:20 by sprague | 5 Comments   
Tellme Wow
It's official: the Microsoft Speech Deal of All Time : we announced that Tellme is now a part of Microsoft. My boss is in Mountain View today to meet the new people. You'll hear a lot more about this in the next few weeks. And meanwhile, I'm not the official Read More...
Posted 14 March 07 03:00 by sprague | 2 Comments   
Filed under
What it feels like to merge with Microsoft
The last time I quit my company to look for a job, I joined a small start-up company in Silicon Valley. It had fewer than 100 employees and everyone was extremely smart, hard-working, and in love with our technology. Many of us had specifically chosen Read More...
Posted 14 March 07 08:36 by sprague | 3 Comments   
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XNA game developer finalist uses speech
Heiko Rahmel pointed me to this new game by Afurtado as part of the Four-Day XNA challenge at the Games Developer Confernce. It uses our speech SDK . Read More...
Posted 11 March 07 09:57 by sprague | 1 Comments   
Speech Programming
I recently received the following question that Kevin submitted to this blog: I'm interested in speech programming in c# and was wondering if you have some sample code for recognition in particular as i hope to develop a speech enabled ordering system Read More...
Posted 08 March 07 01:13 by sprague | 0 Comments   
Unified Communications at VoiceCon
Jeff Raikes, head of my division, just made a keynote address at VoiceCon Spring 2007 , the big show for people in the voice industry. Since my group is part of the same division that brings you Office Communications Server, several of my friends are Read More...
Posted 07 March 07 02:27 by sprague | 0 Comments   
Microsoft Research Techfest keynote webcast today
Look at http://research.microsoft.com/ today at 9:00am (PST) to see Rick Rashid (head of Microsoft Research) kicking off our annual Techfest event. This is that time of year when MSR pulls together their coolest new demos and shows them off to (1) the Read More...
Posted 06 March 07 08:07 by sprague | 1 Comments   
Summer Internships at Microsoft
Do you like languages? Do you like audio? Are you a year or two from graduating and starting to wonder where you'll end up? We're looking for students who want to work in my group for the Summer, and if you have an interest in Speech Recognition or Synthesis Read More...
Posted 05 March 07 12:10 by sprague | 0 Comments   
One more thing you can't do on Mac
David Pogue, the New York Times technology writer, gives another example of a cool thing available on Vista that you won't see on the Mac . As always, Rob Chambers' blog is the best place to learn lots more. Read More...
Posted 01 March 07 02:48 by sprague | 2 Comments   
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