Thursday, May 27, 2004

SALT vs VXML : Part 1 - XML is not a programming language

moved to http://www.computertelephony.org/blog/index.php?p=25

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Jail cells do not have windows!

From the Fish Don't Notice Water file:

A standard feature of movie jail cells seems to be a window with bars and no glass. The hero can chat with friends standing outside or (more commonly) receive escape materials through the window. What gives? This is some sort of cultural QWERTY phenomenum, a cliche so engrained it doesn't get changed. It's been decades since a jail cell had glassless windows, or even windows at all.

Thursday, May 20, 2004

The Name: Silent Software

The name of this blog refers to a quality of good server software, it sits in the corner and just works. The fact that people forget about it, or at least take it for granted, is an indication of success. But silent software is not about software that is mute; servers should log copiously when asked to, and fail loudly.

"Just works" is a perception, not a physical characteristic. Lack of quality for a product can be defined as the gap between reality and expectations. It's just as important for a product to manage expectations as it is to manage the product itself. Especially new technology like speech recognition, where expectations can easily be set sky high. There is an interesting graph in Speech Server white paper showing how increasing CPU speed will improve recognition quality over the next number of years. The challenge for the next few years is finding domains where the current speech rec software can work well.

Testing, testing, testing

Hello, world\n :)

I'm new to Blogger and to blogging so we'll take this slow.

This will be a blog about two things. First, I have an interest in the process of developing software
software, including agile practices, software architectures, and project tracking.

Secondly, I'm interested telephony and in particular speech recognition applications. This stems from my current position at Pronexus, working on two telephony toolkits VBVoice and VBSalt. VBSalt 1.0 is being released shortly, to coincide with Microsoft Speech Server.