Midwest Speech Technology Association

I'm moderating a session at SpeechTek on open-source tools. If you are the author or manager of, or contributor to an open-source tool that you'd like me to list during my talk, please contact me ASAP.

Members of MSTA are eligible for a 10% discount for SpeechTek, which will be held in New York on August 7-10. Use registration code "MSTA6."

The Midwest Speech Technology Assocation (MSTA) does not have any restrictions or requirements that limit membership. Anyone who participates in speech technology, or is interested in speech technology, is invited to join.

At present, we do not have any membership dues. To join the MSTA, simply subscribe to the MSTA mailing list. You will then receive our (infrequent) mailings and invitations to our bi-montly meetings.

Please note that you do not have to be currently employed to be a member of the MSTA. In fact, we encourage MSTA members who are currently looking for work to bring their resumes to meetings and place them on our "information table."

The next meeting of the MSTA will be held on Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 6:30 PM in the Oracle Corporation offices in Sears Tower, Chicago. Our speakers will be Deborah Dahl, Chair of the W3C's Multimodal Working Group, and Rick Rappé, VP of Business Development for Vocal Laboratories. Dinner will be provided before the meeting. There will be a wine, beer, and cheese reception following the presentations.

You may register now. Other guests of Oracle that week will include the VoiceXML and Multimedia working groups of the W3C, so we anticipate an exciting meeting.

Rick Rappé will discuss some of the latest findings on the acceptance of speech recognition by consumers, in a presentation titled "Speech Recognition Usability Testing- What's New?"

Deborah Dahl will discuss the work of the Multimodal Working Group of the W3C.

Our host will be IBM, at their brand-new TEC facility in downtown Chicago.

Our technical speaker will be Steven Cawn, a speech technology specialist at IBM. The title of his talk is "View of the Future: An Industry Roadmap for Speech Technology Rollouts." He will overview the key technologies that will be market ready over the next few years, and the impact these will have on speech deployments. Editor's note: This is an excellent opportunity to come up to speed on IBM's view of important trends in technology.

Our marketing talk will be by Tim Walsh of Walsh Media, "The Emerging Business of Persona Management." Personas are expensive, personas are big business, and working with the brand managers at the clients can be difficult as the clients extend their brand from text and images to voice.

This meeting marked the start of the fourth year of the Midwest Speech Technology Association. We were delighted to be hosted once again, as we have been every year, by Oracle.

Our technical speaker was Eric Burger, CTO of BrookTrout.

Our marketing talk was a panel discussion: "When Worlds Collide: ScanSoft and Nuance." We'll have panelists from the company, from the SALT/Microsoft world, an independent analyst, and a end user. Please check back soon for more details.

The meeting was hosted by SpanLink at the offices of Cisco in Rosement, Illinois.

Our technical talk was Dan Kauppi of SpanLink on "Speech Recognition in a Converged Environment using Cisco's Customer Interaction Network." The talk covered VoiceXML, MRCP, and call control capabilities, and how these integrate into the call center.

Our marketing talk was by Andy Eidson of Grainger (the huge supply/parts company), who gave a fascinating presentatin of how their integration of speech technology into the call center drove revenue and transformed their business. One observer calls Grainger's

This meeting marked the start of the third year of the Midwest Speech Technology Association. We were delighted to be hosted once again, as we have been every year, by Oracle, and our thanks to Oracle for their excellent hospitality!

Our speakers were Judith Markowitz and Ken Rehor. Meeting notes, along with copies of the presentations MP3 audio files of the presentations may be found here.

Our thanks to Walsh Media and Nuance Communications for hosting our meeting.

Our technical talk was by Janet Cahn of Motorola, speaking on "Elements of Expression in Synthesized Speech." Her abstract discussed both academic and commercial "non-gratuitous" applications.

Our marketing talk was by Mike Cosky (Nuance), Tim Walsh (Walsh Media), and Joe Farrell (Apptera), "Bringing Persona to Life." Walsh Media, Nuance Communications, and Apptera have worked on some interesting joint projects and discussed how to build and brand a persona — each company contributes unique expertise to the mix.

We had two talks. Our marketing talk was by Microsoft, who discussed how they will market their Speech Server initiative.

For a technical talk, Vail presented "Mainstreaming Speech: Packaged Application Development on Microsoft Speech
Server." Vail has worked closely with Microsoft on SALT and Microsoft's speech initiative. The presentation discussed technical information about implementing Microsoft's SALT language for speech recognition on platforms.