Okko in Speech

This post isn’t really about speech technology, but I wanted to share that after a long time of wondering what the point was, I finally found a use for twitter: Twitter Lists. With these you can follow a group of users with a common theme, either by packing them into a list yourself or by subscribing to other users’ public lists.
However I still can’t be bothered to check twitter.com for updates, nor do I care to install another 3rd-party app for enriching my user experience. And unfortunately there is no direct way to follow a list as an RSS feed, which is how I prefer to consume information¹.

Thankfully, yet another neat little Yahoo Pipes mashup comes to the rescue. Simply enter the lists’ creator’s user name and the list name, and off you go.

To add a bit of speech tech to this post, here are a few sample lists that you might find interesting:
@die_lautmaler/voicebusiness
@alisohani/machine-learning
@suellewellyn/cunning-linguists
@rachelcotterill/computational-linguistics
(And thanks to people compiling these!)

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¹ Interestingly, several friends have recently pointed out that they have ditched RSS for twitter as most of their regular feeds also post there.  However I receive too much content via RSS that twitter won’t deliver, such as Google Alerts, and I find sorting through the twitfeed quickly becomes a chore, something you’ll still have to do when reading lists, I suppose. Also, leaving an open protocol for a commercial (if free) service seems like a step in the wrong direction…

Google last month released several new features to their translation service among them a text-to-speech rendition of the English translation.  As reported elsewhere, it turns out you can directly access this service using a simple URL in your browser.  Following this link will return an MP3 of the text sent along with it:

http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?q=Hello+reader

Just replace “Hello+reader” with any text that you want spoken in your address bar.  Remember to replace spaces with pluses (+).

Some browsers however seem to have problems with the returned audio.  Chrome worked for me, though Internet Explorer is reportedly working as well.

As this is not an official RESTful Google API don’t be surprised if it stops working. Beware that commercial reuse of the output audio is likely also governed by license restrictions.

Update:
Friend Schamai pointed out how this could be employed in a web form. Here’s an example:

Speak as MP3

Or the corresponding HTML:

<form action="http://translate.google.com/translate_tts">
<input name="q" size="55" value="just saying" />
</form>


I stumbled across some “traditional” news bits this week for speech and language technologies, representing most of the major and a few interesting minor market players . Yahoo is offering some kind of NLP-driven structured search for e-commerce solutions starting next year. A new bundled automatic translation software with automatic learning capabilities was announced by across Systems GmbH and Language Weaver. Loquendo is sponsoring a speech-for-in-car-navigation industry event. Persay, maker of voice authentication software, is shipping solutions securing Planet Payment’s voice-enabled payment processing. Lastly Nuance, continuing its acquisition spree, buys Viecore, a contact-center integration consulting company, indicating a clear focus on strengthening its traditional speech and telephony market position.

Recently I stumbled across and blogged about VoiceGlue, an integration of various GPL-licensed pieces of software, providing full IVR capabilities (including rudimentary speech synthesis but not recognition.) Well, last night, together with Christoph, I finally had a stab at it myself.
Our test setup involved running Fedora 9 virtualized in Mac OS X. Our Fedora installation was missing a few pieces of software beyond the indicated prerequisites, but after about an hour everything was under way.
The trickiest bit proved to be building various modules required for the XML parser (I presume needed later for VoiceGlue-customized DTMF grammar parser.) For some reason CPAN’s console kept conking out on us (claiming inexplicably missing/unbuildable prereqs), so after wrestling with that for some time, we decided to manually build all the modules ourself (hoorah, makefiles).
This worked like a charm, though we hit a snag with the Module::Build perl module, which required C_Support, which in turn required another perl module (ExtUtils-CBuilders), not mentioned in any documentation (scant across the board, though that’s half the fun, isn’t it).
After that, the VoiceGlue installation completed swiftly and all services started running after a minimal bit of configuration.
Next week we’ll be back with some test calls and our first impressions. In the meanwhile we’ll keep our eyes peeled for ASR integration (LumenVox/Sphinx), which will make this a truly valuable stab at open sourcing some of the most expensive carrier-grade technology out there.

Back after an extensive break. Been working hard on some of my own multi-modal ideas. Keep your eyes peeled.
Looks like it’s been a quiet fall, speech and language technology-wise. After GOOG-411, Microsoft has also added speech to their search engine endeavors (if in a different domain) by speech-enabling Live Search for mobile users. Nuance continues to consolidate the speech tech market.
Exciting news on the IVR front. Finally a serious attempt to integrate various open-source technologies to provide free carrier-grade speech/telephone services is under way. VoiceGlue has managed to combine OpenVXI (VXML browser), Flite (Speech Synthesis) on Asterisk and is planning to integrate Sphinx2 for speech recognition. All components would then be available under some form of the GPL. Could this herald a change in availability of speech telephone platforms for developers unwilling to dish out horrendous per-port costs? Something to follow, anyway.
Lastly, here‘s an article describing the growing role of speech in warehouse management.