I have just uploaded to Slideshare a short presentation about the Nu Echo approach to dynamic grammars.
For text-based applications too!
Remember that NuGram Server is not only for speech-enabled applications. You can use it to parse text-based sentences, too. So it is an ideal complement to your preferred cloud-based SMS or IM application platform like Tropo, Twilio, Teleku, just to name a few.
Try it now!
It’s free for development use, so don’t be shy. Give it a try! You simply need to register, upload your grammars, and use one of the many APIs we provide.
The Nu Echo team is proud to announce the availability of NuGram 2.1.
The noteworthy new features in this release are:
- Enhanced sentence generation tool (NuGram IDE)
The sentence generation algorithm has been further improved and a new strategy (Rule examples) has been added. Sentences can now be generated from specific sentence patterns. Also, the generation process can be stopped.
- New sentence explorer (NuGram IDE)
The user interface of the sentence explorer has been completely changed. It is now much more intuitive and easy to use. It also allows sentence patterns to be added to the sentence generation tool.
- Semantic interpretation optimizations
All supported semantic tag languages based on ECMAScript have been optimized (compiled scripts are now properly cached). This dramatically increases the performance of the coverage test tool.
- Complete rewrite of the underlying parsing algorithm
The algorithm that matches sentences with the grammar rules has been completely rewritten. It is now much more efficient, in terms of speed and memory consumption.
- Post-processing API (NuGram Server SDK / Professional Edition only)
NuGram Server now provides an API to implement and deploy application-specific post-processing routines.
- Initial support for different target ASR engines (NuGram IDE)
It is now possible to specify the target ASR engine in the preferences. This affects the way words in grammars are normalized, and also how grammars are converted to GrXML.
- Small enhancements to the ABNF dynamic grammar templating language
The templating language now supports new forms, like optional grammar headers.
- Many small improvements and bug fixes
The free Basic Edition can be downloaded directly from within your Eclipse environment. Simply follow the download instructions. Or contact us for the Professional Edition.
Please, let us know what you think of these new features!
November 10, 2009 – 10:39 am
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.
October 14, 2009 – 6:24 am
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.
October 1, 2009 – 10:47 am
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.
