New York is the place to be on August 24-26! It’s the host of SpeechTEK 2009, the world’s biggest speech technology conference and exhibition!
Again this year, Nu Echo will have a very strong presence there, with:
- a SpeethTEK University course by Yves Normandin on advanced speech application tuning topics at (session STKU-6 at 9am on Thursday);
- a presentation by yours truly on speech grammar coverage analysis (session C302 at 11:45 am on Tuesday);
- a booth where we will demonstrate NuGram IDE, our flagship Eclipse-based development environment for speech recognition grammars, and NuBot, a full-featured automated application testing tool for both inbound and outbound IVRs; and
- a number of very exciting announcements; and
- of course, several of us from the Nu Echo team, who are looking forward to meeting you all!
Don’t wait any longer! Register online and use the registration code VIPNUE to get a 25% discount on the conference pass or a free exhibit hall pass.
Come see us at booth 513!
On August 27, I will be giving a SpeechTEK University course entitled Advanced Speech Application Tuning Topics.
This course will provide a synthesis of the speech application tuning methodology and techniques that we have been using – and continuously enhancing – over the past several years at Nu Echo. In essence, I will be describing the foundations (technical and methodological) of our tuning practice, which has proven so effective at delivering applications with very high success rates.
Even to those of you with significant tuning experience, I believe we will be able to provide a novel and, quite possibly, surprising perspective to this very challenging problem.
Here is the abstract, as it appears in the SpeechTEK program:
This course will teach participants a rigorous, data-driven speech application tuning methodology that will enable them to build robust speech applications that effectively deal with how real users actually behave, not how we would like them to behave. Topics include utterance and dialogue-level performance metrics, managing out-of-grammar utterances, techniques to effectively identify and address performance problems, dealing with multitoken utterances, tuning phonetic dictionaries, computing enhanced confidence scores, setting confidence thresholds, and running dialogue simulations. The presentation will be illustrated by numerous examples and interactive demonstrations using field data from real-life applications.
I am looking forward to seeing you there. And if you can’t make it to the course, please come see us at booth 513. I would be happy to give you a demonstration of some of the tuning tools we are using daily in our speech practice.
I will be speaking at SpeechTEK 2009 in August!
Here is the abstract of my talk, entitled The Art and Science of Speech Grammar Coverage Analysis, as it appears on the conference site:
As the speech recognition grammars required by today’s applications become increasingly complex, identifying and fixing grammar coverage problems can become quite challenging. Using real-life examples, this session will provide an overview of some of the best practices and techniques for effective speech grammar debugging and coverage analysis. In particular, we will showcase tools no speech scientist should live without: an interactive sentence explorer and a sophisticated, highly customizable sentence generator.
The talk will mostly focus on the kind of problems we face when developing and maintaining speech recognition grammars for real applications (not toy problems). It will clearly demonstrate that effective tools can really help develop grammars faster, while ensuring greater quality and less maintenance hassles.
Also, this talk will be the opportunity for me to demonstrate NuGram IDE‘s improved sentence explorer and its sophisticated sentence generation tool. This is indeed very cool stuff (I can’t wait to demo them)!
See you there!
