Sensory Blog

I was in Barcelona last month at the Mobile World Congress. Here are some of my speech-centric observations: I went by the Microsoft booth on the first day of the show and asked when WinMobile7 would be announced. The guy on the floor acted like he had no clue what I was talking about. He wouldn’t even confirm it hadn’t…

Yeah everyone’s writing about the new Google phone. I’ve heard various reports about it being underwhelming, and in-need of the marketing hype that Apple is so good at. Everybody loves to compare the iPhone with the Nexus One and talk about screen size, weight, camera capabilities, software, etc. Here’s my 2 cents on speech recognition and Bluetooth for these devices:…

My last blog was about TTS. When things aren’t pronounced right from a TTS engine, the linguists can go in and add “exceptions” so the standard pronunciation rules don’t have to apply in specific cases. Of course the easy way to get TTS to pronounce things right it to spell everything phonetically correct, then no exceptions or special rules are…

The new Android OS doesn’t have this problem! I read about one of these devices with TTS (Text-To-Speech) built in and voice commands too, so of course I had to try one out. I put it into TTS mode where it speaks everything, hit the recognition button and it prompted “SPEAK NOW.” I said something like “Starbucks in Sunnyvale, California”…and…

We have had a lot of requests over the years for products that are always on and listening for a key “trigger” word. The challenge of this approach is making a “trigger” that doesn’t accidentally trigger when it is not spoken, but also doesn’t accidentally NOT trigger when it IS spoken. The trade-off between these two types of errors is…