Speak now… Listening…

Posted by Wolf Paulus on May 26, 2013 in Software

You may have seen the impressive demo of Google’s Web Speech API, during the 3 hour long keynote at this year’s Google I/O conference. However, experiencing an interactive speech-enabled web search yourself, can be even more enlightening.

Prerequisites

Your computer needs to be equipped with a microphone and speakers and needs to have the latest version of Google’s Chrome browser installed, which is currently Version 27.0.1453.93.

Experiencing Speech-enabled Web Search

Now goto https://www.google.com and click on the small microphone icon, on the right side of the text input field.
The page your were looking at disappears and is replaced with a much larger red microphone and text that changes from “Speak Now” to “Listening…”

Chatbots 3.3 Conference

Posted by Wolf Paulus on Mar 29, 2013 in Software

The Gathering

The legends and current elites of AIML and Turing AI (not necessarily disjoint groups) met for their yearly gathering at Seed Philly, a Philadelphia tech startup incubator, located in the heart of Center City.

The Chatbots 3.3 conference was a fast flowing event with exciting flash-talk style presentations, always followed by Q&A segments. The amazing speaker lineup included several Loebner Prize winners, AIML Engine developers, VCs, Psychiatrists, Artificial Intelligence researcher, and best-selling authors.

Dr. Richard Wallace

The Highlights

Dr. Richard Wallace, Loebner Prize Winner 2000, 2001, 2004 and father of AIML, talked about the new AIML 2.0 Specification that focuses much on making AIML more succinct, while maintaining its simplicity. He stated that it currently took about 10,000 AIML categories to create a believable character. ALICE for instance has about 100,000 categories and the PROFESSOR, a bot with one of the largest AIML knowledge bases, has about 580,000 AIML categories. Writing that many categories is not only very time consuming (experienced AIML authors may be able to write one category per minute) but also requires a memory capacity, not available on many embedded and mobile devices. AIML 2.0 therefore tries to make AIML more efficient, allowing the creation of a believable character with as little as 1/6 of the categories needed before.

Installing Java 7.x and Tomcat 7.x on Debian Squeeze

Posted by Wolf Paulus on Mar 15, 2013 in Software

Tomcat 7 is the first Apache Tomcat release to support the Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2, and EL 2.2 specifications. Please note that Tomcat 7 requires Java 1.6 or better so we start with installing a recent version of Oracle’s JRE.

Install Oracle JRE 7 on Debian Linux

To install Oracle’s Java Runtime with apt-get, we first need to entend the list of apt-get’s sources. Once that is done, an java-installer will actually install the Java SE Runtime Environment. Here are the steps to follow:

Techcasita Interview Series: HTML5

Posted by Wolf Paulus on Jul 13, 2012 in Software

“Already, Mobile is the largerst technology platform in human history and we are just getting started.” …
I have already covered Qualcomm’s Uplinq 2012 Developer Conference a couple days back here. But there is still one last thing, I need to mention:

TechCasita Productions attended Qualcomm’s Uplinq 2012 conference, which heavily promoted the usage of HTML 5. Rob Chandhok, President of Qualcomm Internet Services and Qualcomm SVP of software strategy: “HTML 5 is the best possible way for developers to take control of their destinies in a cross-platform world”.

Uplinq 2012

Posted by Wolf Paulus on Jun 29, 2012 in Software

Qualcomm’s Developer Conference spanning multiple leading mobile platform

At Uplinq 2011, Peter Chou, CEO of HTC, gave the opening keynote on the 2nd day of the conference, followed by Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop, and Jon Rubinstein, who headed HP’s Palm Global Business Unit. Only one year later that “extraordinary lineup of heavy hitters” would have lost some influence and power, which just shows how fast time progresses for everything touched by mobile.

Uplinq 2012 focus was software development for mobile, documented by this year’s keynote addresses from Aaron Levie, Co-founder and CEO at Box and John Hering, Co-Founder and CEO at Lookout.

Qualcomm demonstrated the capabilities of its Snapdragon Processor but the focus was on software and software development kits using (showcasing) Qualcomm hardware and software technology like Gimbal, AllJoyn, Vuforia, or FirethornPay.

My bag of Development Tools

Posted by Wolf Paulus on May 28, 2012 in Software

Besides a select few (you know the “I’m only using *”, where * is either emacs or vi) most developers I know have a number of tools, they cannot live/work without. The set of development tools I’m using is ever changing, but a favorite of them all remains IntelliJ IDEA, an unbelievably smart IDE for Java and Android as well.
I might be a little biased; way back in 1999, I was working for Artificial Life in St. Petersburg, Russia and after they closed their offices there, some of the best engineers moved on to Jetbrains, starting to work on IntelliJ – and that’s what they are still doing. If you happen to work with Eclipse a lot, you may want to give IntelliJ a try.
Anyway, I thought I’d share, what’s in my bag of tools today ..

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