/bill's House O Insomnia : Speech Server

VOIP Gateways....

William — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 21:02:24 GMT

I know after my UG presentation a few weeks ago many of you are asking about VOIP Gateways. Marshall Harrison over at GotSpeech is really the goto guy on this, he was the one that tipped me off to where to get them. Start your search Here. Marshall recommended the MP-114 and all I can say is that for the price, you absolutely can not go wrong. It's just an amazing device and if you consider how much you had to spend to even get started with a real telephony card in the old days, it's just flat out amazing. Once you've got it hooked up to your speech server, again something much easier now than it ever was before, you're off to the races. Is it really that easy? Yah, pretty much. I'm currently running a Wireless pre-n router at home and have all my machines hooked up through it. I did however, just for ease, hook the speech server box directly into the router as opposed to going wireless but that's not to say I had any problems with the wireless, at least none worth admitting.

I'm presenting on Speech Server 07 at the Atlanta .NET Users Group

William — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:30:00 GMT

If you are in Atlanta and at all interested in building speech enabled applications, I'll be presenting

tomorrow at the Altanta DNUG. The meeting starts at 6:00 and the presentation commences at 7:15. I hope to see you there.

Speech Server 2007!!!!!!

William — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 01:55:00 GMT

Marshall has got the scoop

A great guy makes MVP

William — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 22:56:00 GMT

Well, I've seen quite a few of my friends make MVP (Scott, Chris, Sahil , Tobin, Brian to name just a few) but now I can add one more.. Not only did Marshall get the Microsoft MVP Award, it appears they added a group for Speech Server which is awesome. I wonder if KC will get nominated for a 5th category ;-)

HttpModule for Dynamic Grammars

William — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 16:58:00 GMT

In a few minutes, I'm doing my presentation on Tips & Tricks with Speech Server. One of my new tricks is using a HttpModule to build a Dynamic Grammar. Greg Young was the one that came up with the idea and he deserves *full credit* for it - it's a...(read more)

Speech Server Days - Ft. Lauderdale

William — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Here in Ft. Lauderdale. Delays were nuts b/c I flew through Charlotte, and all the planes coming in from Florida were delayed. Anyway, got here last night and all was good. Finally got to meet Marshal Harrison and his wife. Even cooler than I thought...(read more)

Win a 'BrookTrout TR1000 For Microsoft Speech Server' Kit

William — Fri, 05 May 2006 19:12:00 GMT

You've probably seen this already, but figured I'd mention it in case you haven't. The good folks at GotSpeech and Cantata are raffling off a TR1000 kit. Details available here.

Phenomenal Speech Server Development tool

William — Fri, 05 May 2006 12:54:00 GMT

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

I'll be speaking at Speech Server Days

William — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 12:33:00 GMT

I'll be speaking at Two Speech Server Days Events . I have one presentation on May 3 in Atlanta and one in Ft. Lauderdale on June 2nd. Marshall Harrison is going to be speaking as well at the Ft. Lauderdale event, so finally I get to meet him. If you're going to be around and are interested in Speech Server, by all means stop by.

Text To Speech Ideas?

William — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 04:01:00 GMT

I've been getting back into my Speech Server book and well, there's a lot to it. My 4th chapter covers Grammars in depth and is a lot longer than I anticpated. If you do much speech work, they you know that Grammars are everything and ostensibly the most important chunk of development. Anyway, i was proofing my Text To Speech chapter and one of the examples I came up with was well, fairly cool. To use the TTS engine, it's pretty straightforward, you really just need to call the Speak method of the SpVoice object passing in a String and some flags. Anyway, there's not really much to it so I was looking to come up with a cool angle. There are many applications that will allow you to read the text on a page, but I just created an implementation that allows you to specify a URL and it will retrieve the text and read it back to you. As I was writing it, I started to use my new found Regex expertise to strip out the HTML , and then I realized that wasn't a good idea. Why? Because if you don't have the markup, then it's hard to differentiate between values on a blog or a web page. So what I need to do now is check for blog entries and instead of stripping out the tags, just replace them with recognizable text. That way, they will be read (probably don't need to closing tags) and I can tell the difference between blog titles, entries and the like. In its simplest form (without stripping out markup), here's what the code looks like. I'll be posting the stripped out version later - so you can have a simple blog reader than can read to you as you multi-task something else:

private void btnSpeak_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
     SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags SpFlags = SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags.SVSFlagsAsync;
     SpVoice VoiceDemo = new SpVoice(); 
     WebRequest DemoWebRequest = WebRequest.Create("http://msmvps.com/WilliamRyan"); 
     WebResponse DemoWebResponse = DemoWebRequest.GetResponse();
     Stream ReceiveStream = DemoWebResponse.GetResponseStream();
     Encoding encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("utf-8");
     StreamReader readStream = new StreamReader(ReceiveStream, encoding);
     String Response = readStream.ReadToEnd(); 
     VoiceDemo.Speak(Response, SpFlags);
     readStream.Close(); 
     DemoWebResponse.Close();
}

This application also allows you to point to a blog, and have it read the entries, and save them to a voice file. I tried it with a few of my favorite blogs and it's pretty decent. Having a little trouble recognizing "Pr4n" and "a55" but that can be handled with Regular Expressions (hell, or even simple String.Replace methods). The only problem is that it doesn't lend itself well to material you want to publish.

In case your interested, the next part of this application that I go through in Chapter 4 is using voice input to recognize what you ask it, and retrieve just what you ask for. So you can ask it to read a specific blog , skip entries, repeat items it's just read and well, anything else I can think of. Each of the latter demonstrate implementations of Grammar utilization and well, are amazingly powerful. I started working on a Dual Tone Multi Frequency application which allows you to read stuff from the phone - so you can use Touch Tones to read blogs, select new ones, repeat what it read and the like. This is giving me a little more trouble than I was expecting but I'm getting close.

So what do you think? Am I on the right track with the idea of replacing markup tags with clearly recognizable ones, just so that it makes a better 'being read to' experience?

Book Update

William — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 18:41:00 GMT

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'.

Ideas Wanted

William — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 01:25:00 GMT

Well, as I sit here swamped in more work than I ever imagined that I'd be lucky enough to have, I need to be proactive... As I've mentioned a few times, I think Sahil currently holds the high water mark for kick a55. Ok, if I racked my little brain I'm sure Charles Petzold or Jeffrey Richter probably wrote something better but until I meed Charles or until Jeffrey teaches me a magic trick (or better yet, takes me for a ride in his helicopter), I'm standing by my assertion. Well, I really want to join that club. Which brings me to my current conundrum and I have a few questions that i would ask for your feedback on:

1- I've seen a lot of discussion about 'tone'. I actually remember some dipsh1t lecturing Sahil about the tone and style of his writing. And to be honest, there's a lot of disagrement on it. I've heard a lot both ways, about too much conversational style being a distraction, too much straightforwardness being boring. If I had my way I'd lean a lot toward the humorous conversational way of writing but, I don't have that little voice in my head that tells me when I'm going to far. With respect to tone, Sahil does a great job, as does John Robbins. I absolutely love the way they interject real world stuff they've been through with technical content. Johns story about Debug Assertions still makes me laugh. But I've also heard a lot of people say John went too far and it's _______ (fill in critical word here). Well, whaddyathink here?

2- Without divulging trade secrets, a big part of the book is going to be the walkthroughs at the end that wrap up the material and explain things in depth. My ideas so far go something like:

Dial Tone Confession - "Hello, you've reached Father WindowsBox. Using the keypad, enter the time (in months) since you're last confession... If you've taken the name of the lord in vein, press 9, fornicated, press 8, etc etc"
Digital Girlfriend - (I'm going to have some trouble here though b/c Sara's a smart a33 too and the digital boyfriend she'll come up with will probably be more brutal). "What do you want to do tonight honey?" "Shop" "Cool, IRiver has new portable media centers out and i've been dying for one" "NO BILL, I meant shop for me, how does White House Black Market Sound" "Boring, how about Circuit City" "Where's my rolling pin" You get the idea
Recruiter - "Hi Bill, I have an exciting opportunity I'd like to tell you about" "Are you a recruiter" "Yes" "Go to h3ll and die" "Well I see here you have .NET Experience" "I lied, I don't even know what .NET is" "Ok, don't say that in the interview, when can you do a face to face"
Interview the Prophet (Never mind, i don't want killed)
McDonalds Drive through - I'd take the menu and prices from a local McDonalds and let you put in an order, cancel things, change them, give you your total and tell you to drive ahead
Conversation with Linux or Firefox zealot - Admittedly, I'd have to work here not to go over the edge but I still think this could be funny. Actually, the only grammar you'd need for the firefox guys would be "Well IE isn't standards compliant, Security, Haliburton" (for you Team America fans)
Dial A Liberal /Dial a Conservative - Now way to be policitally correct and be funny but could probably squeak this one through.
Gangsta Rappa - Ok this is probably my favorite one but in order to do it, I'd need explitives. Maybe I can get it through and do it as a separate download
Computer Science Professor - I'll model it after my beloved Dr. Jarman but I without a visual I can't make it roll it's eyes in disgust every time I ask it something. Nonetheless, since most of my readers will probably have had at least a CS class, this could be fun.

All of these would show you how to create the scenario using Speech Server. Yes, it's going to be a *** writing it all. Each one that I've toyed with outside of the straight telephony one is going to be rough. However it's a great way to teach how to really use one. +, Sara is pretty kick a55 with Artificial Intelligence so we could do a lot.

So here's your chance to be heard. Got an idea? Let me know b/c I'll seriously consider just about anything. My Gangsta Rappa Persona is probably going to die an early death as are most of these (I have two that are totally serious already that will definitely make it through) but that's b/c I tend toward the offensive. I honestly do welcome your ideas and will credit you fully for them.

Kick a33

William — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 03:18:00 GMT

Casey Does it again Totally kick a55.

Fedex API

William — Sat, 28 May 2005 20:38:00 GMT

Since Web Services have become cool, I've tried to do as much with major commercial ones as I can. The problem is that in professional terms, I haven't had many requirements where I really needed to use them. I'm written some utilities for my own use that employ the Google API, the Amazon API and the PayPal API. I picked up this Apress book on a few of the major API's and I really liked it. I was just checking out Wrox's site to see if my name had been added to the author list on the two books i'm working on ( I know, I know, that's lame but I wanted to send mom the link whenever it's updated) and I came across A similar Wrox book that covers the Fedex API as well (from the cover, the Author, Denise Gosnell looks pretty cute too I haven't been able to get any of the Fedex API Winforms samples to build - at least using the out of the box example. I ended up using Reflector and just recreated a new project w/ slightly modified versions of the dlls..

This is really cool and I'm guessing that combined with MapPoint (which I'm not necessarily a big fan of, but it works for the hobby type projects I do with it), you could add an even more compelling tracking feature. Sure, it wouldn't be of much more value as things stand today ... if my package is in BIR status in Memphis, what good does having a map show me that do? But in the near future, I'm guessing that they may open up some more stuff with GPS so you could see where the trucks were. Yah, this wouldn't provide much of a real benefit, but it would be cool and quite easy to do so I'm guessing it might be done

If anyone is interested in playing with the Fedex stuff and having trouble, let me know b/c I've recreated most of the Winforms project and it seems to be working pretty well right now [well in the sense that I'm not getting any exceptions - I don't have anything 'real' to track at the moment, but I'm thinking of ordering something and having it fedexed just to test it.

Finally, what about my Speech Server and X10 project. Got phase 1 completed already. Right now, it's pretty simple. I have some extra speakers hooked into the boombox piece that one of my XM Radio's snaps into. So I can hit a button, say “Annoy Kim” and It will turn the volume up (I can't sleep at night without the radio on - Kim can't sleep with it on. I also have a very loud Cuckoo clock that can be turned off during the night hours - but I would never turn him off. Kim really hates the radio at night, and my poor cuckoo when he comes out in the middle of the night). I have a simple grammar, “Annoy Kim”, “More” , “Keep Annoying her”, “Really piss her off” and “Leave her alone” which turns the volume up a notch for the first three commands, turns it the whole way uip with the “Really piss her off” and mutes the radio with “Leave her alone” She's with Sarah in North Charleston this weekend heading to a Water Park so I have a really cool surpise for her when she gets back. I also have another grammar for Sarah “Wake Up Mommy Slowly”, and “Wake Mommy NOW”. Sarah is a wonderful child and she's extremely smart - but she's also a bit devlish and there's NO doubt in my mind she's going to be very very excited about being able to wake up mommy.

I have too much in the way of screen shots and all to post it here, but I'll post a summary later tonight and have the code up on Knowdotnet.com afterward

Holding my feet to the fire

William — Tue, 17 May 2005 04:27:00 GMT

Chris Williams took notice and layed down the guantlet. With kind words like his, coupled with such a good challenge, I must make it so.... It will happen.

Atlanta Code Camp

William — Tue, 17 May 2005 00:34:00 GMT

I'm late to blogging this one, but I'm sure everyone else has covered it. All in all it was a great event. Had a rather hectic beginning though. 5:00 Am on Saturday, Kim and I haeded to the airport to rent a car. Unfortunately, Greenville/Spartanburg is the only airport (even friggin Augusta's airport which is a grass patch with a few Cesna's has 24/7 rent a cars available) that doesn't have 24/7 rentals. So we headed out in her car and got to Atlanta about 2 hours later. For once, i didn't get lost. Got to the Microsoft building in Alpharatta and was very impressed. Checked into code camp, and Kim hung out for a while, then headed over to the W Atlanta. As a side note, if you have never stayed in a W, trust me on this, it's a must. From the first time I visited one I was addicted to it. Atlanta is the most mainstream of the ones I've been to , but it still ROCKS. Anyway, she took off and rented the room. I got a new Lacie USB Drive just for this presentation b/c the week before, I had my visual studio install go bad on me. So about 11:30 I was prepping for my prestentation and the Virtual Machine started up, VS popped up, and then just went away. No error messages, no nothing. No sign whatsoever that there was a problem other than it just disappeared. I had another demo on Tablet PC, but after talking to Michael Earls, I decided to just run through the Speech Server demo again. I asked everyone attending and they were all cool with it so I did it instead.

Before I continue, let me say that I met some really cool people. Tammy Pettway was doing a presentation on the Enterprise Library and I saw the slides she was working on but her presentation was the same time as mine. I wish i could have seen it b/c she was impressive. Got to rap with Maxim Karpov again but dammit, I still haven't get to hear him speak. Everyone that's heard him is like totally captivated by his presentations, so I really hope sometime I can hear him speak.

I sat in the speakers lounge for about 3 hours with Michael Earls, and a few other guys from Magenic. I really like working at Tiba, but just listening to the dialog between the magenic guys, it seems like it's got to be one of the coolest places on earth to work. I got to speak to Steve from Aspsoft who was an awesome guy... wish I had more time to talk to him. Shawn Wildermuth was there but I didn't get a chance to talk to him - and one the off chance he's reading this, I definitely would like to have him autograph a copy of his book for me ;-) The first time I read it, I wasn't that impressed with it, but the more I've read through it, and the more I've followed Shawn, the more I realise that he's a definite bad a55. Wally was there and I got to rap with him for a while.

Mark Dunn was there and I got the chat with him for a few, as well as Todd Fine from RDA and a few other folks, including Chris Williams . Chris gave me a really killer idea. Michael Earls has been doing a lot with X10 and Windows Media Center.. so when he saw my demo, he recommended combining XP Media center, X10 and Speech Server to manipulate stuff in your house. This is my 1st objective next week when I finally get some free time. If I don't have a working demo using XP media Center editiion, X10 and Speech Server by June 1st, please feel free to write me and remind me that I am a lazy procrastinating windbag. As an aside, Todd Fine has a really impressive Avalon demo which is beyond cool. Chris has some of the coolest Tatts that I've seen in a while. i got to thinking that with a litte, you could use Avalon and do some really cool stuff that corresponded to someone's tattos. Gotta rap with Chris about this.

Anyway, I started to feel a little ill toward the end of my speech, and some people had commented that I lost my voice. Kim came and got me and I hit the bed for a quick nap. Was planning on hitting Mortons for dinner. I hit the bed at 4:30 and when I woke up, it was 9:00. Unfortunately, I didn't get to hook up with Jeremy Brayton b/c I slept right through everything. Kim is a great girlfriend but Terrible alarm clock. So we hit Trio's which was ok. Next morning we hit the cheesecake factory and it was awesome as always. Then we headed home. I let Kim drive for the first leg and well.... check out my pictures in the gallery (all of them begin with Atlanta Code Camp).

Finally, when I got back to the office, I got this message from Steve Ballmer:

“Thanks to you give everyone in code camp my thanks and respect “

So now all I need to do is finish the remaining parts of the chapters I have outstanding, get my webcast done, and then get cranking on the X10 Speech Server project.

BTW, I've done more and more with Speech Server recently but can't really guage interest in it. Commercially, I know that adoption is limited to essentially really large installs out there and to date there aren't any books on Speech Server (I may be changing that) . Michael has got me mega impressed with his Media Center stuff and I've seen that http://www.brains-n-brawn.com/ on it, so God only knows what kick a55 implementation he'll come up with. I definitely need to get on the bandwagon too but would apprecaite any feedback in general about what everyone finds interesting (or if there's even interest in Speech Server outside of simple techonological curiousity). I know I'm probably leaving a few people out, but i'll update if I did. All in all I had a great time and would like the thank the Atlanta folks for having me (and giving me an excuse to spend some time at the W again).

P.S. All pictures (many didn't come out unfortunatley, are in the gallery if you're intersted)

My Speech Server is all the way thug

William — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 22:24:00 GMT

So far, I'm throwing a few ideas around to really make my upcoming code camp presentations good. I just ask myself “What would Casey Chesnut ” do and then I get good ideas. So I was playing around with it, and started putting in Lyrics to Fifty Cent Rhymes as my prompts. You DEFINITELY need to use Fifty's voice and load them a la Prompts db for this. If you dare try to put the lyrics in and roll via TTS, it's ugly. TTS Can Not rap at all. I mean zilch. I could rap better and that's saying a lot. Heck, I think John Ashcroft could rap better than TTS. But the funny part is that it does pronounce the words correctly. Ostensibly the best line of the bunch was:

<<I'm a boss, but nigga's never show no respect
I catch em slippin, I have em tongue kissin my tech- >>

The whole effect is just totally lost when it's dispensed via TTS.

Anyway, I parsed enough files from the massacre to get a killer prompts db. Building the grammars to support it though - it's UGLY. I could probably spend all month because of all of the different ways words are pronounced.

If you want a good chuckle though, go find some Geto Boys or Body Count and pop the lyrics in a QA control. I can just about guarantee that you'll laugh your a55 off.

Speech Server, Book Writing, Code Camps and Pimped out rides

William — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 06:42:00 GMT

For the last week, things have gotten kind of weird in my life. And by most standards, I'm pretty friggin weird to begin with. I stared working with Wally McClure on writing a book and so far, things have been going really well. But so far I've only encountered the easy part. This week, I am going to get 'busy'. Busy in the sense that in 21 days, I'll have 3 code camps, a web cast, and two books due. I know, I keep writing about this but I'm trying to get myself pysched for it because falling on my face, isn't really an option.

Lately, I've been mobile within the apartment and for some really dumb reason, I moved from my office and bedroom to my living room to work. In my living room is the TV, which is almost never on. This week, I've been watching it while working. I CAN'T Believe it, BUT I'M Actually starting to really get hooked on Pimp my ride. Watching complete morons get their cars worked over, and get stuff like a Tablet PC that's configured to recognize their rhymes, well, it's interesting. I used to really hate bling bling vehicles, but the high tech nature of Pimp My Ride is intriguing even if I know damned good and well that those Tablet PC's live about 3 hours before mmoving to the Pawn shops.

-----

Speech Server. Well, I've got 2 presentations on it next weekend. Of the people presenting at Charlotte, I'm probably the least impressive of the bunch. However, I honestly think I'm going to have most compelling presentation. I have many shortcomings in life, but being a braggart isn't one of them. Nonetheless, I'm absolutely convinced that I'm going to steal the show Saturday. Not because I'm the man or any crap like that, I just have a topic that by the mere virtue of what I'm doing, is just too cool.

Ok, so what am I going to do specifically? For starters, I decided that I'm going to simulate a conversation between a dude and virtual wife. Just take all the typical stereotypes of a wife, and build her into a grammar. Nothing to fancy there to be honest, but it's something that will probably get a few chuckles. So where did I get the data for the wife being that I'm not married? Well, you might be thinking Kim right? Wrong. I'm not suicidal. Actually, I'm using Peggy and Marcy from Married with Children. All in all, the hardest part of this so far has been accomodating preambles. What is a preamble? Well, in the rest of the country you probalby have no concept of them, but here in the South, preambles are a friggin fine art. Let's say that you want me to fix X as my manager. So we built a speech server to expect X as an input, check it against a Bug Database and make the determination from there. A preamble would be something like this:

Goddamit Bill, you told me you fixed [X]
Hi Bill, how's it going today? I heard you got a new tablet? How do you like it? Did you have fun this weekend? Well, when you have a chance can you take a look at [X], it appears not to be working
Howdy Bill. How You Do? Waaayaaaah, I wuz wundrin if you might kuld take a look at [X] when you have a moment.

People not only speak differently in respect to pronunciation, but in sentence constructs as well. No one north of the Mason Dixon line ever “Might Could” have done anything. No one south of Pennsylvania ever Warshed anything. But this is the crap that encompasses preambles. This is a key concept because you really don't want to waste any of your Speech Server's resources trying to figure out what the hell Warsh means, when most people wouldn't want to know if they could.

I'm thinking about doing the later presentation to a South Park Dialog btw. For instance, I'm watching Extreme Martial Arts on TV right now. For those that know me, the fact I even have a TV on shojuld come as a shock. But I am. I've also been eating Vicodin by the boat load all week, so maybe that's contributing to it. Here's my plan for a Show Stealer:

I'm going to break everyone into one of two groups
Group A gets to be Kyle's mom
Group B gets to be Cartmen
One by one, each group gets to select their response.

When they are all done, I'll implement them via two different programs. Now, if I can get both programs to talk to each other based on the audience's responses, and the dialog goes as planned, then I got it right.

Currently, to bookmakers favor the fat goofy guy on Vicodin.

I have one other idea as the Coup de gras but I think it's sucking compared to the last one. I'm going to set up a dialog between my laptop and my cell phone. For instance, have the laptop ask the PDA for Steve Ballmer's cell phone number. Then when it gets the reply, go ahead and call Steve. He doesn't usually pick up, but I figure if he takes a call an it's a Speech Server talking to him - he'll be cool with it.

Any ideas Suggestions?