Nu Echo Blog

On September 16th, I will be giving a joint Developer Jam Session with Tobias Göbel from Voxeo on Advanced Speech Grammar Management with the professional edition of NuGram IDE on the VoiceObjects platform. In this talk, I will explain the main differences between NuGram IDE Basic Edition and the Professional Edition. More precisely, I will cover the following topics:

• Advanced sentence generation and coverage
• Batch tools to test and convert your grammars at application build time
• The automatic builder
• The NuGram Server SDK

and more. I will also give an overview of the NuGram roadmap for the upcoming months. Finally, Tobias will talk about the integration with the VoiceObjects environment.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn more about NuGram IDE Professional Edition!

As another proof that NuGram IDE is becoming the leading grammar development environment for speech recognition grammars on the market, at SpeeckTEK 2009 yesterday in New York, Voxeo and Nu Echo announced that NuGram IDE Basic Edition is now integrated into VoiceObjects Developer Edition. This is a part of a plan to accelerate the development of speech applications on the VoiceObjects platform and providing developers with the most effective tools for developing multi-channel applications.

Also, since Voxeo provides an integration with NuGram Hosted Server, VoiceObjects can already be used for designing applications in needs of complex dynamic grammars.

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!

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!

One of our customers recently started using NuGram IDE for the development and maintenance of grammars targeting the IBM speech recognition engine. As is often the case with the IBM engine (and others as well), their ABNF grammars use the “.gram” extension.

NuGram IDE’s default extension for ABNF grammars, however, is “.abnf”, which means that it’s not configured out-of-the-box to work with “.gram” ABNF files. The reason is that the “.gram” extension is often used for binary, compiled grammars.

This can easily be fixed using three simple steps.

Step 1 - Adding a new file association

The NuGram IDE plugin adds to the set of content types already supported by Eclipse, a new content type for ABNF grammars. To associate “.gram” files with the ABNF content type, open the preferences and select the page “General > Content Types”. Then select the “Text > ABNF Grammar File” content type. Finally, click on “Add…” and type “*.gram”. You should see something like:

Content Types Preference Page

That’s it! Opening a “.gram” file will now properly launch the ABNF editor.

Step 2 - Setting the extension for newly created grammars

Now, if you want to create a new “.gram” grammar using the New ABNF Grammar wizard, you have to set the default extension in the preferences:

Default extension for new ABNF grammars

Step 3 - Configuring the project-specific translation rules

To completely support “.gram” grammars, the project translation rules must also be configured appropriately. That’s because all the grammar tools must be also know how to handle references to external grammars whose extensions are “.gram”. By default, references to “.gram” grammars are translated into references to “.grxml” grammars (the reason for this behavior will be explained in a separate post). You thus have to make sure that references to “.gram” grammars are not translated and can be used as is.

To do that, select your grammar project in the Navigator view and open its property page (by pressing Alt-Enter or right-clicking on it and selecting “Properties”). Under the “Grammar Development > External Rule References” category, deselect the rule named “.gram to .grxml” applied at “Runtime”:

Disable .gram -> .grxml translation rule

Final note

Although I focused exclusively on grammars with the “.gram” extension, the above steps equally apply to any other extension. So go ahead, adapt NuGram IDE to your own needs and habits!