About 37%, or in numbers, 95 million U.S. adults have smart speakers in their homes. Half of them are daily active users. However, in the last two years, user growth has only been at 4%. (Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report Mach 2022) About 70% of surveyed businesses stated that voice-enabled digital assistant technology is critical […]
Technology
Conversational Interaction Conference 2022
I did something last week I hadn’t done for quite some time: I spoke at a conference in front of a live audience. I started speaking at conferences in 2002 after I had created the SwiXml open source project: Graphical User Interfaces were described in XML documents, parsed at runtime, and rendered into Java objects – Android […]
One Lambda to rule them all
Whenever I got a new laptop or was (re-)installing macOS from scratch, a Java JDK, IntelliJ IDEA, and Tomcat, the “pure Java” HTTP web server environment, were always among the 1st things I installed. How times have changed. Now it’s Docker, Python3, PyCharm, and AWS and SAM CLIs that go on first. I still do […]
Tunneling Web and Git access through a remote VPN Client
This post is for the long tail since only a few will find it helpful, but for those it may just be the dramatic productivity booster they were looking for. Imagine a scenario where you have a dedicated machine on you local network and only that machine has a VPN client installed, which allows access […]
Cable Modem Signal Levels revisited
Fourteen years ago I wrote a blog post about the signal levels that come in and go out of your typical cable modem. Some things have changed some stayed the same. Let’s revisit this topic. The IP address to connect to a cable modem is still the same 192.168.100.1. These days, I’m still using a […]
Frictionless Speed / Zero Intent Skills
Teams had taken four runs down the 1,450 meter (almost 1 mile) long track, made of reinforced concrete, covered in ice. Still, their combined times were separated by less than a blink of an eye. The ice on the track varied, the colder and harder, the faster the sleds would go. A sled’s metal blades […]
Deploying Python AWS Lambda Functions
When it comes to deploying lambda function into AWS, I have been using mostly Java for the implementation language and runtime. However, using Python has some advantages, especially if the code does not require parallel threads. E.g., the deployment package is usually a lot smaller and waking the lambda function, after it hasn’t been used […]
Alicia vs Alexa
Democratizing the creation of delightful audible content Have you ever heard an interview with Alicia Keys? She spent most of her childhood in Hell’s Kitchen, one of New York City’s toughest neighborhoods. Experiencing how much emotion she’s putting into each word and her very deliberate expressive pronunciation means you cannot just casually listen but have to […]
A Universal Voice Browser
On September 25, Amazon released 80 new devices, some of which can be found here. Even for a company of its size, that is an impressive number and an even more impressive line-up. However, I think something much more profound happened a day earlier. On Tuesday, September 24, 2019, at 11:04 AM EDT, in a […]
From the Docks to the Gate
This is a story about a simple web-service that answers only one question: if a given number is prime. The core problem is first solved with a Java class, which is then wrapped into a WebServlet and tested within a web server environment. The web server, however, does not get directly installed, but a docker […]
Only speak when spoken to
It wasn’t Steve Jobs, but former Apple Computer CEO John Sculley, who in his book Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, introduced us to the Knowledge Navigator, an astoundingly capable virtual assistant. Today, more than thirty years later, smart speakers are trying to implement at least some of the conversational concepts, envisioned in the Knowledge Navigator video, […]
How to get conversational UI right
Cross-Post from my article on VentureBeat.com With the rise of AI, voice, and more generally language-driven technologies — like chatbots, Siri, and Amazon Echo — conversational user interfaces (CUI) have a chance of becoming the next major technology platform after mobile. The field of conversational UI holds a lot of promise in terms of how […]
SpeechTEK 2017, Washington, District Of Columbia
— The Einstein Memorial – National Academy of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Ave NW, Washington, DC 20418 “New uses of speech technologies are changing the way people interact with companies, devices, and each other. Speech frees users from keyboards and tiny screens and enables valuable, effective interactions in a variety of contexts.” Clearly focused, SpeechTek 2017 was intended […]
The Path to the CUI is Heavily Mined and Booby-Trapped
Cross-Post from my article in Chatbots Magazine The concept of the Conversational User Interface (CUI) is not really new. Wolfgang Wahlster of the German Research Center for AI, DFKI, wrote 12 years ago in his paper on Conversational User Interfaces: “Conversational user interfaces allow various natural communication modes like speech, gestures and facial expressions for […]
Conversational Interaction Conference
The CI-Conference is the successor of the Mobile Voice Conference, and like its predecessor, organized by Bill Meisel and AVIOS (Applied Voice Input Output Society). The two day conference (1/30-31) ran like clockwork at the Westin in San Jose, had a keynote, two keynote panels, and 26 sessions. What makes this conference unique, is how it balances academia and […]
AI World Conference
The AI World Conference and Expo took place from November 7th to 9th at the Parc 55 Hotel in San Francisco. DIGITAL ASSISTANTS AND BOTS William Meisel, Ph.D., president, TMA Associates, led a 1/2 day seminar and provided insights and analysis on how to determine, which applications are best used for Digital Assistants and Bots communicating […]
The Conversational User Interface is a Minefield
Cross-Post from my article on Medium The path to an acceptable Conversational User Interface is heavily mined and booby-trapped. Let’s not fall into the IVR trap, but create a humanized and personalized user experience. [IVR – Interactive voice response is a technology that allows a computer to interact with humans through the use of voice […]
Mobile Voice Conference 2016
The Applied Voice Input Output Society (AVIOS) and TMA Associates organize the annual Mobile Voice Conference, which this year took place at the Westin in San Jose, California on April 11 and 12. Recognizing that speech recognition, speech synthesis, as well as language interpretation has matured, the Mobile Voice Conference 2016 focused on Language User Interfaces and explored trends […]
Putting your Bot into Slack
It all began back in 1990, when Hugh Loebner initiated a contest, designed to implement the Turing Test. The Loebner Prize is an annual competition in artificial intelligence, where judges decide, which chatbot is the most human-like. The format of the competition is that of a standard Turing test. In each round, a human judge […]
SpeechTEK 2015 – New York City
This year, the annual SpeechTEK conference focused heavily on Virtual Agents and Advances in Biometrics. The conference took place at last year’s venue, the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City, but more noteworthy, this was the conference’s twenties anniversary. So I thought it was only appropriate, to put my conference talk “Bridging the Gap between […]
Mobile Voice Conference 2015
The Applied Voice Input Output Society (AVIOS) and TMA Associates organize the annual Mobile Voice Conference, which this year took place at the Sainte Claire Hotel in San Jose, California on April 20 and 21. The Mobile Voice Conference examines the current state of speech recognition, speech synthesis, and natural language understanding technology, what it […]
JSON Schema
JSON, the JavaScript Object Notation, has a somewhat misleading name, since it is used for data exchange in a lot of places that have nothing to do with JavaScript. It has become very common that web-services encode all sorts of payloads using JSON, which is then decoded on the receiving end, using libraries like Google’s gson, which […]
Listen2014 Conference
Listen 2014 was a short one-day conference, focusing on “Voice Interfaces for the Internet of Things” organized by Wit.ai Inc, the company that provides a WebService, making it easy for developers to build applications and devices that you can talk to. The conference took place on November 6. 2014 at the unique Bluxome Winery in […]
SpeechTEK 2014 – New York City
I was able to attend this year’s SpeechTek 2014 conference in New York City. Organized in four parallel tracks, the conference’s advanced technology track was devoted to topics like virtual agents, voice biometrics, natural language understanding, or speech technologies for smart devices. Bruce Balentine, @brucebalentine Chief Scientist at the Enterprise Integration Group, gave the keynote […]
Mobile Voice Conference 2014
The fourth annual Mobile Voice Conference took place at the Hyatt Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, on March 3rd-5th, 2014. Opening the Mobile Voice Conference, Robert Weideman, GM and Executive VP at Nuance, stated in his keynote address that building an intelligent multichannel virtual assistant, delivering personalized customer service via a human-like conversational interface, built on […]
Start/Stop Script for Python Programs
For the last two years or so, I often find myself in the situation, where I need to quickly prototype a Web-service that is accessed by mobile applications. If successful, the service will eventually be hosted in Amazon’s AWS Elastic Compute Cloud, most likely in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (EHEL 6) instance. Besides a […]
Open Text Summarizer
The open text summarizer is an open source command line tool for summarizing texts. The program reads a text and generates a summary. By default, the summarizer tries to reduce the text size down to 20%, for a this short text about python for instance, the summary would contain only the highlighted text. Python is […]
Lips don’t lie
To create a believable virtual agent or avatar, involves many dynamic tasks, one of which is to coordinate your character’s facial animation with a sound track. For a chat bot, a typical lip-sync process, may look something like this: Generate the voice track by synthesizing the text the bot needs to speak. Break down the voice track into […]
Chatbots 3.3 Conference
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 […]
Being at home, even when you are not
Virtual Private Network Being born and raised in Germany, most of my extended family lives over there and even after all these years, a simple phone call easily reconnects me with family and friends. Almost like a secret handshake, dialing a number and hearing each others voice makes me part of their networkover there. With a […]
Protect your online privacy when on the road
Using your Home Router as a Secure Socket Proxy f you use your Laptop computer at the local coffee shop, in a hotel while traveling, or at any location where you expect your online privacyat risk, you may want to consider some extra steps to protect your electronic mail and Web browsing behavior from those nosy […]