Good morning! This post is coming to you super-early, because I have way too much to do later today. So, before my boss creeps in, here’s all the news for the week so far. Our faithful, intrepid managing editor Len hath returned from the Genesys G-Force conference (read his posts about G-Force here), and he’ll have more to report to you in coming days. Such as what he did with the Genesys-emblazoned belt buckle … and how the rest of the office kind of wants it to add to our wall of “free stuff vendors send us.” So, unless you’re totally intrigued by how Xerox (haha, remember photocopies?) plans to compete with Google and Salesforce, or that giant squid is still freaking you out (hello, it has the world’s largest eyes), follow the jump for less-disgusting news stories! [Speech Tech Blog, Information Week, Associated Press]

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The Voice Search Conference winds down around 5pm tonight, but by then I’m on the flight back to NY.

Another journalist I spoke with said he got all excited when he listened to the opening keynotes, but was inevitably disappointed towards the day’s end due to the overall lack of focus on voice search itself.

I feel similarly; many of the panels didn’t have a lot to do with voice search (and they all could have used more live demos. If you’re going to hawk a solution, I’d like to see it in play). Loquendo’s Paolo Baggia told me during lunch that he was going to give a talk called Improving the user experience.

“It’s not really about voice search, though…” he said.

Both Bill Scholz and Bill Meisel stated in the panels they moderated that they’d defined voice search “very broadly.” To what end? To what extent is it beneficial to have such a vague definition? If you’re going to devote an entire three-day conference to a topic, shouldn’t that topic be clearly defined?

The conference did highlight issues regarding voice search (whatever that may entail). Click below for the rest of the article.

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If you go to our website, you’ll notice that some of our webstories are speechified. We’re using Loquendo’s TTS engine. The voice is called Alison. We chose her because we liked her concatenation and she didn’t sound too threatening. We also convinced our editor-in-chief that she was actually Cokie Roberts. Tell us what you think in the comments below!

We also have RSS feeds. Hold on to your hat!

Finally, we’d love for some of you clever people to contribute to this blog once every two weeks. If you’re interested, send us an email. Let us know your name, title, and favorite speech tech-related deployment over the last year. Also your favorite superhero and/or Greek god.