Phenomenal Speech Server Development tool

Hopefully I can do a full update later this evening about Speech Server Days  in Atlanta. (The next one is in Ft. Lauderdale on June 2, 2006 and will be way cool)  The host of the event was Cantata Technology  and they have an awesome developer's kit .  Awesome as in "totally kicks a55."  For Development, they have a kit that's under $700.00 (US) that has  a board, a telephony kit, drivers and everything else you need to get started.  Everything. You can literally plug the board into a hot phone jack at your home or office and away you go.  I didn't get to use it while I was there, but I read through the information and I'm ordering one this weekend. [If you haven't done any Speech  Server work, one of the hard parts of development is doing a real simulation of the telephony components b/c it takes a good bit of setup unless you have something like this. If you're just trying to learn Speech Server on your own, setting up the telephony portion in a manner that verifies that it will really work can be a challenge. yes, you have the telephony interface, but even with it, you get the feeling that it may not work without any isssues whenever you 'really' deploy it.  The BrookTrout TR1000 gets you right over this.

I met a lot of cool people and learned a thing or two myself.  I was glad to see that there were that many people interested in Speech development.  Hopefully the Lauderdale event will go as well.

If you were at the event, I mentioned that I'd be posting some custom templates that you can use in Visual Studio .NET 2005.  I have not had time to get them up yet, but you can email me and I'll shoot them over to you, otherwise I should have them up tomorrow.  I figured I need to post the instructions on how to set them up and get them running, so it's going to take me probably 30-60 minutes to do that. If you're jonesing for them though, lemme know and I can shoot them over to you today.

Also, I met a lot of great folks there and saw some really cool stuff. One of the people I met was Greg Young .  I found out he blogs and well, I was extremely impressed.  Flipped through his blog and immediately subscribed. If you haven't followed Greg's stuff yet, give him a read, he writes a lot of 'out of the box' stuff and has some very cool ideas on development.

Also, looks like we're going to get a http://www.microsoft.com/speech/default.mspx up and running on http://www.kjmsolutions.com .  It should be ready to go shortly, but we will have some web services opened up and a few other publicly accessible items, so that you can have some free resources if you're interested in doing speech development