Contents tagged with Speech
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So what have we been up to lately at Speak With Me?
I noticed that this week I got five emails from friends asking "So what's been going on?" or something to that effect! I figured this would be the easiest way to tell everyone!
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Speak With Me - Video of our Navigation Application!
Hey everyone,
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Know any good T-shirt / Silkscreening vendors
...We're going to be making some Speak With Me T-shirts soon!
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Speak With Me is hiring!
Well, this blog has been quiet for a long time. There have been lots of things in progress, most of which I unfortunately haven't been able to publicly talk about.
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Using the dialogue manager for 13 hours straight was as addicting as crack...
Nothing like changing your tunes at 90 mph while going through the tunnel on I-90 in the rain... while keeping all my concentration still on driving. How addicting? Almost as addicting as track day at Laguna Seca is for a speed freak and car nut like myself...
Oh, also while in Seattle, I attended the Podcast Hotel, caught up with Chris Pirillo and made a few new friends, including Bre Pettis and Cielito Pascual. Bre and Cielito so graciously helped me film a video of the dialogue manager in Seattle, which will be broadcast on Bre's Blog in about 2 weeks as a Podcast.
What in the world was my car and me doing up in Seattle for a week? Well, a roadtrip to visit friends of course! Oh and speaking of friends, I do believe I owe a thank you to an old friend who tried to set me up two and a half years ago with a group of people in Seattle I happened to finally meet with this time around... -
1835 miles of driving with the dialogue manager under constant use...
So... I finally worked out my vibration issues with the hard drives -- first by switching to laptop hard drives, then by adding some creative engineering:
and special foam and at first things were better than before, but not quite good enough for all the various road conditions out there.
The problem?
The computer needs to be rigidly mounted. Bungee cords weren't enough, and because I was tinkering with things so much, I had removed the wooden panel framing the computer as seen in this pic:
I put that panel back in, and with the computer now firmly held in place, ALL my vibration problems were solved. I tested this on my drive back from Seattle to San Francisco and throughout the Seattle and SF Bay areas as well, and everything worked great! I wonder if this setup would hold up on Laguna Seca... -
Review of Speak With Me prototype system by Mike Arrington
Well, as I said, we officially started Speak With Me. Mike Arrington of Tech Crunch just did a review of a very early beta of our system, which he saw at TagCamp
The review is here:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/10/30/speakwithme-control-your-car-by-voice/
We fully plan to exceed your expectations. As for who our customers are, we can't say yet, other than that we are targeting both aftermarket car stereos and navigation systems, as well as those sold as part of a car you buy off the lot as well.
Special thanks to everyone who's been a great support to us so far, you know who you are!
Oh, and to anyone who even thinks about stealing my car the way Mike suggests, there is a very sophisticated alarm as part of the car that pages me if you so much as brush by it when you shouldn't.
You can however, see my car at the Toys for Tots car show in Los Angeles Dec. 11th, 2005. I am part of the Team Transport show squad.
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The Trials and Tribulations of a Startup
So, as some of you know or may have been able to figure out, I'm starting a speech company.
No big secret there. What I found out along this path is that there are two types of people out there, the selfish type
and the ones who consistently lend a hand without thinking "What's in this for me?"
What I've also found is that the people at the top of their game in this world, the true "masters of the universe,"
tend to be the type to help others out, no strings attached.
I'd like to take a moment and publically thank everyone who has consistently been very helpful and also when needed,
gone out on a limb for me. Sometimes that limb is only a twig!
Alex Rudnicky
Anand Manikutty
Andre Vanier
Arthur Chan
Ashleigh Anderson Felber
Ashu Kumra (Ash Gianni)
Catherine Copetas
Christian Chu
Ed Lin
Itamar Drexler
Jim Bai
Jon Anderson
Kimberly Lutjen
Manjul Bose
Mark Stehlik
Melodie McBride
Mike Shafer
Mom
Renee Lo
Ricky Houghton
Robert Scoble
Sarah Revi Sterling
Saureen Shah
Sean Patterson
Susan Trainer
Ted Havill
Vinod Krishnan
Yan Ke
These types of people are rare, and to be cherished dearly.
THANK YOU!!!
If you have a story to share about someone remarkable, feel free to either link it in the comments or mention them there.
People on this list are welcome to make fun of me, make jokes about me, or do whatever they feel like in the comments :)
If one or more of these people happens to also be one of your friends, you are a very lucky person, and consider yourself blessed! -
Got scobleized...
I got scobleized this morning!
So, yesterday on the way to the Geek Dinner, I decided to give scoble a ride so we could get into the carpool lane. As what I'm doing is now visible to people taking a ride with me, he got an inside scoop on some little things I am up to...
This is also why my blog has been so quiet for over a year. Want to see a sneak peek of the future? Come to the BarCamp.
For now that's all I'll say. When the products get made and are closer to release, there will be more noise. Consider this the teaser. -
Sphinx 3.4 coming out soon...
So I just attended a talk by Arthur Chan, formerly of SpeechWorks (now ScanSoft), who is now staff at Carnegie Mellon, and he's working on a new version of the Sphinx 3 recognizer (Sphinx 3.4). It's a very sophisticated approach using a tree-based lexicon (which improves speed, and marginally reduces accuracy of words that are slurred or cut off, since the language model cannot boost confidence scores with this approach), and a continuous HMM (Hidden Markov Model).