Nuance Go on Acquisition Run, Focus on Mobile

Nuance Communications, well known for automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis software have acquired a whole series of companies this year to allow diversification in mobile and vertical markets like healthcare. Nuance are probably most famous for their domination in human speech technologies, both desktop speech dictation systems and enhanced IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems.

Beyond Google and Yahoo - video search

Blinkx TV is another innovative service that indexes almost all the video content on the web. What’s very impressive about Blinkx is that it also indexes the audio portion of the video and transcribes that to text using speech recognition—that makes Blinkx search results more relevant (you can search by lyrics of the song). And Blinkx shows short preview clips for every search result without you having to load the full video in the browser....

The first post

Welcome to "I Talk Speech" (I think in my mind that's meant to be "iTalk Speech"), and thank you for dropping by.

For quite some time during my previous employment I was running and maintaining a library on the corporate intranet of snippets and tidbits of what was going on in the speech industry. Actually, it was a really useful resource. Whenever there was a business case or market requirements document to prepare, nearly all the data and information was at your fingertips in one place. I have this sinking feeling, though, that I was the only one that read it.

Now that I have moved on, I've decided that I should try and do something similar - moving to a blog format to perhaps engage more readers and promote interaction and discussion. A single place you can come to to find out what's moving-and-shaking in the speech technology industry. A smattering of News, View and Reviews.

I don't know if it will work, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

If you'd like to provide feedback on how this resource could develop and be improved, please feel free to do so, as kindly as possible.

cheers,

Nik

Cepstral Donates Open Source MRCP Stack to Telephony Industry

Cepstral LLC announced that it is providing the first open source Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP) library, OpenMRCP, at no charge to telephony application developers. Cepstral, a pioneer in Text-to-Speech (TTS) voice software, is donating OpenMRCP to the developer community in order to spur the development of telephony applications that interact with distributed speech resources such as TTS and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). MRCP is a standards-based communications protocol that allows telephony applications to communicate with speech resources, similar to the way TCP/IP allows browsers to communicate with web sites. [click heading for more]