Hey Speech-Heads,
Just about everyone here at The Home Office has SpeechTEK Europe Fever. My Speech Brother Eric B. has it so bad he had to hire an Office Health Aid. Like he said: “I’m nervous and my socks are too loose.”
So, as we all count down to The Big Dance, check out Conference Chair Jim Larson dishing on some of his personal programme highlights from SpeechTEK Europe.
What are you looking forward to at SpeechTEK Europe 2010? I believe that speech-enabled multimodal applications are the wave of the future, and so I’m particularly looking forward to Professor Wolfgang Wahlster’s Keynote presentation on research in European universities and company laboratories in the areas of speech, multimodal, and multilingual technologies so I can plan to use these new types of technologies when they become available. In Developing Multimodal Applications, attendees will learn how to integrate web-based services to create “mashup” applications involving speech, and how to develop multimodal applications on a variety of mobile devices. I believe these approaches will be widely used to deploy speech-enabled multimodal applications that customers can use anywhere, anytime on nearly any device. In our Panel Session: Advanced Speech Recognition Techniques and Experiences, developers will give first hand experiences about designing, implementing, and deploying call routing applications. I’m looking forward to learning from their successes as well as their mistakes in providing voice-based call routing. The Using Voice Biometrics Session explains how to identify speakers and verify that speakers are who they claim to be. These promise to help minimise fraud and theft. The European market place is multilingual, yet most of today’s speech applications only speak and understand a single language. SpeechTEK Europe has two Sessions on developing multilingual speech applications, how to conduct usability tests in multiple languages, and how to deal with cross-cultural attitudes about IVR and speech systems. Other highlights for me at SpeechTEK Europe are sessions describing challenges in new IVR markets, key directions for unified communications and hosting/premise, and a panel of analysts predicting the future of speech in Europe. |
