Most of my conversations with my alarm clock are woefully one-sided. They usually begin with simple pleading (“No. Please, no.”) and culminate in profanity (#$%@, I just want a little more !@#$-ing sleep!). To both protests, my alarm clock remains silent. It doesn’t respond with a snarky, “Up, late now, were we?” or “Get your lazy behind out of bed.”

However, there’s a talking alarm clock that uses speech synthesis and voice recognition to talk you into getting up. As you can see in the video, the clock can actually ask you questions and respond to your answers.

The idea behind the talking alarm clock is that  many will awaken more easily if they are told to get up rather than–as paraphrased from the website–’rudely blasted from slumber by bleating noises.’

Your friendly alarm clock can also inform you about the weather, time or current headlines and can be attached to MP3 players or IPod so you can also use music to rouse you from slumber.

Speaking personally, I might have to choose music over answering math problems as shown in the demo. Doing math before noon would most likely force me to perpetrate irreparable alarm clock assault.

Sadly, our beloved Adam B. has moved on to other illustrious career goals, but I hope to keep his spirit alive with, well, obviously, strange robot posts. It wasn’t hard to find a strange robot story for you, my dear speech-heads. Last week, an I-Fairy robot wed a couple in Tokyo.

Kokoro, the company best known for populating the world with Hello Kitty paraphernalia, created the I-Fairy for all your robot needs–whether to officiate your wedding or lead your next meeting. At $70,000 US dollars, what are you waiting for? I-Fairy stands at four feet tall (not much shorter than yours truly) and according to the Kokoro website, she has an “attention-grabbing cute design with a strong presence!” I’m still not sure, however, how the I-Fairy looks like fairy–she doesn’t have wings or pixie dust (not included I guess), but judge for yourself .

Besides cuteness, what I-fairy does possess is a Text to Speech (TTS) capability, so one can input any written text and the robot will read it aloud. I-Fairy can also interpret a human narrator’s speech or use a pre-recorded voice.

The British government earlier this week eased flight restrictions related to the giant ash cloud from the volcano in Iceland, so you can’t use that as an excuse for not attending SpeechTEK Europe in London May 26-27. But don’t get me wrong: This is not an invitation to come up with a better excuse. On the contrary, my dear Speechheads, it’s a request, nay, a fervent plea, that you attend the show.

But not to worry, if you can’t make it to the show in London, our regular SpeechTEK show a little closer to home will take place in New York August 2-4.

SpeechTEK Europe takes place in only two weeks (26 & 27 May), so if you haven’t already registered, don’t delay any longer .

One part of the show will look at cutting-edge advances in speech technology. Among topics to be discussed are high-definition voice, avatars – the latest in speaking digital assistants, and a new approach to spontaneous speech transcription. One of the session speakers, Ami Moyal, head of the Center for Language Processing at Israel’s Afeka Academic College of Engineering, is particularly excited about the future for spontaneous speech transcription, naming three growth areas.

“Applications include voice mail transcription, in which voice mail messages are transformed into text and sent to subscribers as an SMS, encouraging additional calls and generating more income for the service providers. Inputting SMS messages via voice is another growth area, making SMS accessible to new users and increasing traffic accordingly. And transcribing multimedia audio content for indexing to form the basis of a search application is another important development, improving search engine performance and increasing usage and revenues.”

But he is realistic about the remaining barriers to widespread spontaneous speech adoption. “Spontaneous speech includes a very large vocabulary of words, hesitations and unstructured speech. As such, speech recognition performance is lower than domain-specific applications in which the vocabulary size is lower and language models can be used.”

SpeechTEK Europe Advisory Board member Detlev Artelt, CEO of Aixvox, is enthusiastic about the increased use of speech in real world applications. “As speech goes mainstream we use it in many situations in everyday life,” he says.  “A navigation system, for example, understands where we want to go to and can give us instruction by speech. Your telephone understands you, too: just say who you want to call and the machine connects you. It’s so easy because new devices know their owner’s voiceprints and, to ensure data security, they can hide important data from other users.

“Now, the first interactive movie gives the audience its own role by using speech technology to communicate with the protagonist, and help the actor flee the killer,” he continues. “I’m sure we will see many more solutions like this in very near future.”

SpeechTEK Europe takes place at London’s Copthorne Tara Hotel. Registration for both conference and free entry exhibition is at www.speechtek.com/europe, and organizers, Information Today, are offering 40 percent discounts for multiple registrations from a single organization.

With less than a month to go before the first-ever SpeechTEK Europe, we’ve prepared a list what you’ll hear at the show, which kicks off in less than four weeks’ time:

Day 1 – Wednesday 26 May

KEYNOTE: Listening to Your Customers: How Companies can Mobilize Consumers as Co-creators and Innovators, by Charles Leadbeater, author and strategist.

PLUS:

• IVR Challenge in New Markets.

• Making IVR Work.

• Voice User Interface Design: Major Issues.

• Key Enterprise Directions.

• The Future of Speech in Europe.

• Video: The Next Level of Automated Customer Service.

• Using Voice Biometrics.

• Developing Multimodal Applications.

• Developing Multilingual Applications.

• New W3C Language Standards for Developing Speech Applications.

Day 2 – Thursday 27 May

KEYNOTE: The Future of Speech Technology, by Professor Wolfgang Wahlster, German Research Centre for AI – DFKI GmbH.

PLUS:

• Designing Real IVR Applications.

• Advanced in Speech Recognition Techniques and Experiences.

• New Uses of Text-to-Speech Synthesis.

• Analytics.

• Testing and Tuning.

• The Ultimate VUI Q&A.

• E-Learning Applications of Speech Technology.

• Cutting-Edge Advances in Speech Technology.

SpeechTEK Europe’s Expo – Unlimited access to SpeechTEK’s Expo, so you can get hands-on with the technology, and meet the people who provide it.

PLUS Pre-Conference SpeechTEK University – Tuesday 25 May – four half-day workshops delivering theory, best practices, and guidelines for solving real-world speech tech problems.