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 […]
Technology
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 […]