Book Update

Published 16 April 6 7:41 PM | William
A few of you have asked so I figured I'd mention a general update on my Speech Server book.  Chapter 1-3 are in the bag and I'm just about done with Chapter 4.

Chapter 1 covers your standard technology introduction a brief description of the tools you work with when building Speech Server applications.
Chapter 2 is a background and description of SALT and now it fits into the current paradigm of speech server development (going forward SALT is on the way out but that's another story)
Chapter 3 covers TTS. This was pretty cool to write b/c building code samples with TTS is pretty neat.  Just to amuse myself, I've put the lyrics of a few of my favorite gangsta rap songs in the TTS engine.  Without a doubt, a big part of having a successful rap career is your 'style' and delivery.  Back in the day when TRON first came out, it proved that you may not need a human to have a successful movie actor. That's been proven over and over again with many virtual girls and the like. Well, the same may be true in the future with rappers, but you're going to need some pretty sophisticated TTS Voices before it even approaches anything that's not completely hysterical.  What I wouldn't do to get a TTS person that talks like William Hung.
Chapter 4 is Grammars, ostensibly the most important and involved part of building speech enabled apps.  I have a little more to work on with Grammars b/c every time I think I've covered everything, I realize that there's a lot more I need to cover.

All in all things are running about three weeks behind the original deadline since I'm flying solo on this one but they're coming along well.

I spoke with my partners at KJM Solutions Hosting and the good news is that, not only do we have Sql Server 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 hosting, but we're going to host Speech Server as well.  So I'm going to have a few web services and other apps that will be publicly available.  If you buy the book, I'm going to have the code provided and you'll be able to hit some of this stuff 'live' which is pretty helpful. It's helpful b/c it's very easy to get web services and other applications working locally but a lot of time the deployment can be a little more involved.  Nonetheless, I'll have everything you need to work through the samples provided locally and also have some stuff publicly exposed so you can do it 'for real'.
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Comments

# Marshall Harrison said on April 16, 2006 4:29 PM:

Do you have a tentative release date yet?

Who is doing the tech review for you?

Lookihng forward to seeing the book once it is done.

# Marshall Harrison said on April 16, 2006 4:32 PM:

Why do you think SALT is on the way out?

I realize multimodal apps are going away but that was a dumb paradigm anyway.

I don't believe that SALT is going anywhere for a while but the addition of VXML may change things.

As for my development I'll be moving away from both SALT and VXML towards the Core API. I just like it better and it feels more natural.

# William said on April 17, 2006 11:29 PM:

Marshall - that was a typo - what I meant to say was that Multi-modal apps w/ SALT were going by by. I need to clear that up, I f---- up the typo big time.

# William said on April 17, 2006 11:33 PM:

Marshall - the release date is going to be sometime after July. I'm got the basic stuff out of the way and am into grammars. i'm a little light in my introduction to speech server , SALT and TTS chapters - not too much you can write in any of those. Grammars is going to be BIG though. I've got a few cool tricks with TTS but nothing too amazing. I'd actually be really interested in your thoughts - what sort of stuff would you expect (better, what would you love to see) in TTS, Grammars etc?

I don't have a tech reviewer but I'll gladly submit your name on it. Actually if you don't mind, drop me an email and we can chat about this privately. I'd like to pick your brain for an idea or two and we can discuss the specifics of the tech reviewer thing.

I'm really wanting to discuss osme of the new stuff in 2007 but for now, I'm sticking with the existing version, just b/c that's what everyone already has. However my site is going to have a Speech Server opened up for testing - I'll be dolling out logins to people I trust so they can use it and we can work collaboratively. If you're interested, let me know.

Cheers man!

# Marshall Harrison said on April 19, 2006 2:36 PM:

Thanks for clearing up the SALT issue. It thought maybe you expected it to just die now that VXML will be available.

You have my email address so we can chat anytime or you can call me in the evening if you like. Email me and I'll give you the home number.

Let me know when you open up your Speech Server for testing. I've got a Brooktrout board at the house but nothing to put it in yet. I need to get working on that so that I can write a review.

How about adding a link to GotSpeech or my blog on your site?

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