TellMe Rolls Out New Features

Tellme®, a subsidiary that Microsoft® purchased two years ago has announced a Spring Release of new features and product improvements that tighten the integration between TellMe & it's parent and take advantage of the deep technical skills from both TellMe and Microsoft's speech research group.

The new release offers improvements focused on:

• Positioning TellMe as a service offering in the emerging Cloud Computing arena
• Improving core speech recognition quality
• Adding new multi-slot recognition capability
• Reducing telecom costs

The enhancements include a new VoIP offering through a partnership with Global Crossing, a new TTS voice which leverages the Microsoft Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine, new acoustic models, phonetic dictionaries and grammar products that increase the accuracy, new multi-slot dialog capability which will allow callers a more natural conversational experience while keeping recognition rates high and new mobile services, including the Windows Mobile 6.5 application. They will now be able to offer not only Nuance and IBM recognition engines but also add Microsoft's engine.

I've hyperlinked to the announcement press release in the opening paragraph so you can take a look at the changes in more detail.

TellMe has always been a strong hosting company and these additions will only further strengthen their position in the market.

Speech Technology At Its Finest!

Thanks to the Speech Tech Blog for bringing this to my attention and enjoyment. I thought I'd pass it along.

Amazon's Kindle 2 TTS & Apple's iPod Shuffle TTS perform a scene from Blade Runner . . .

Apple's new Text-to-speech interface for the iPod shuffle

Apple has introduced an all-new iPod® shuffle, which features a Text-To-Speech interface (called VoiceOver). With the press of a button, you can play, pause, adjust volume, switch playlists and hear the name of the song and artist. The new Shuffle can speak 14 languages including English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

You can you read much more about the new Ipod on Apple's website and you can hear samples of VoiceOver on the Apple Website.

(Thanks to Adam B. at SpeechTechMag.com's blog for bringing this news to my attention).

While discussing this on Twitter this morning (Yes, I admit I've become a Twitterholic!) I sparked a conversation thread about what various folks think about TTS in general and the new VoiceOver feature on the iPod® shuffle.

I have my own opinions, but as a good user interface student, I thought I'd ask for your opinion first. Once I've gathered a good sample of responses, I'll post the results and add my own "two cents worth".

Use the link above to listen to the new VoiceOver interface then take my short survey on SurveyMonkey.com

Take a few minutes to listen to the new iPod® interface, take the survey and let me know what you think!