Alicia vs Alexa

Alicia Keys, honoured with Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award for 2017

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]