In response to many requests from NuGram users, Nu Echo is pleased to announce that it’s now offering a two-day, on-site grammar development course.
This course – Effective Grammar Development with NuGram IDE – teaches participants how to systematically deliver high-quality, high-performance grammars by fully leveraging the features and tools available in NuGram IDE. Using hands-on exercises and numerous examples, the course provides a breadth of knowledge, best practices, and tips and tricks that have shown their effectiveness at addressing the main challenges of grammar development and at delivering better grammars faster.
Topics covered include:
- Fundamental speech recognition and grammar concepts
- The ABNF Grammar Syntax
- Semantic tags – SISR, pre-SISR, swi-semantics, GSL, Nuance extensions.
- NuGram IDE Tools – ABNF editor, Coverage tool, sentence interpreter, sentence generation,
sentence explorer, semantics stepper, grammar conversion tools, etc.
- The Grammar Development Process – Importance of a rigorous and systematic process, how
NuGram IDE supports it, integration into a build process, etc.
- Tips and Tricks – Style issues, guidelines for writing semantic tags, common sources of errors and how to detect and fix them
- Dynamic Grammars – Use cases, traditional approaches, NuGram support (dynamic grammar
language directives, testing/debugging tools, NuGram Server)
- Managing phonetic pronunciations
- Special Topics – Ambiguities, compound words, decoys, disfluencies (voiced pauses, false starts, corrections, etc.), grammar weights, Nuance-specific features.
You have special topics that you’d like us to cover? No problem. We can customize the course to fit your specific requirements. Contact us for details.
Posted in NuGram, Training
In order to ease the integration of dynamic grammars hosted on NuGram Hosted Server, the NuGram team has developed client APIs in a variety of programming languages. The code is available on Github, but a zip file can be downloaded directly from the NuGram web site.
Supported languages/systems are currently:
And there are more to come.
Using these APIs, it becomes really easy to create dynamically-generated grammars for use by your favorite hosted communication platform (be it a VoiceXML platform or one of the many new API-based platforms), or compute the semantic interpretation of a textual sentencehe following grammar template.
An example
Suppose we’d like to implement a simple voice dialing application. A dynamic grammar template (called voicedialer.abnf) for this application would look like the following:
To get a valid recognition grammar from this template, we need to provide data to the template engine (in this case the contact list) to fill in the blanks using call-specific information. This is called instantiating the dynamic grammar.
So to instantiate the template above and retrieve the URL for the SRGS XML representation of the generated grammar in Ruby, only four lines of code are needed:
As can be seen in this example, data used by the templating engine to create the resulting grammar is specified using native data structures of the host language (Ruby dictionaries/hashmaps in this case).
Adding dynamic grammars to voice applications has never been easier! All you need is register for a free account on NuGram Hosted Server and download the APIs.
Posted in NuGram
It’s been exactly six months since we released NuGram IDE Basic Edition to the developer community. We thought this was a good time to ask for some feedback from all users out there.
Whatever your experience has been with NuGram so far, we want to hear from you. Please let us know what you think by taking the NuGram User Survey. It will only take a few minutes of your time and it will help us make NuGram a better product.
Posted in NuGram
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!
Posted in Events, NuGram
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.
Posted in Events, NuGram
