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 […]
vui
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 […]
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 […]