In the last decade, the speech technology market has evolved radically, owing to mergers and acquisitions that have led to a consolidation of the sector and resulted in just a few dominant players.
Loquendo, created in 2001 from the technological core of Telecom Italia, put out a white paper explaining the basics of speech technology. Here is a basic overview of a few of the major points the paper covers:
Interacting with machines that listen, understand and react to human stimuli has been for many years the holy grail of scientists across disciplines. First attempts to build such machines dates back to Kratzenstein's and Von Kempelen's 18th century mechanical speech synthesizer. However, it was not until first programmable computers were invented that computer scientists experimented with models of language understanding and human- interaction.
TradeCard is a supply chain collaboration platform for brands, retailers and their trading partners. Located in New York City, it had challenges with wide-ranging point products, several full-time employees tied up in data processing tasks and only limited data on professional services availability or client engagement profitability.
The company was constrained by their ad hoc technology infrastructure, with numerous systems and heavy reliance on spreadsheets to do simple analytical tasks. "Any company that is growing quickly doesn't have the time to put in a big ERP infrastructure on Day One, so over the years we accumulated a mishmash of systems," CTO Nestor Zwyhun said. "Because data was stored in so many different systems, simple questions like, 'Is this customer profitable, or not?' were difficult to answer."
Seeing as how the company has grown at least 30 percent every year, and is processing 850,000 trading documents a month, they saw they had to change to keep growing. So they turned to NetSuite OneWorld.
OneWorld gives TradeCard the always-available global platform it needs to support its international network, Zwyhun says. By adopting the NetSuite OneWorld cloud product, TradeCard eliminated the ongoing costs associated with multiple servers, including a redundant disaster recovery site.
Countrypet Naturals manufactures, distributes and sells pet foods to businesses and individuals across the United States and Canada.
It's located in Santa Monica, but its manufacturing is in New Zealand. Having distributed warehouses and manufacturing sites added complexity, risk of errors, and slowed order fulfillment.
Countrypet Naturals had brought in NetSuite to integrate the company's accounting processes, but was using a number of small-business applications, including QuickBooks, PC Anywhere, Microsoft Access and GoEmerchant, which were adding to, rather than solving, the company's order, accounting and distribution challenges.
Are Web masters criminally liable for what gets posted on pages they administer? A recent legal decision in Italy is taking the Internet closer to that dangerous threshold, with an Italian judge deciding that "Internet service providers must screen the enormous amount of video that passes through their sites."
According to the Associated Press, a Milan judge "convicted three Google employees of violating the privacy of an autistic teen because the Internet giant sought profit when it hosted an online video of him being bullied, according to the judicial reasoning obtained Monday."
Network World reports that Judge Oscar Magi outlined the reasoning behind that Feb. 24 decision to impose six-month suspended sentences on the executives for allowing the posting on Google Video of a mobile-phone video showing the harassment of a handicapped youth by his Turin classmates in September 2006.
Will Microsoft be able to adapt to the Web-focused landscape, and break out of its software-centric approach? With Office 2010 shipping in early May we'll be well on our way to an answer to that.
As industry observer Michael Fitzgerald reports, "Microsoft will also offer free, ad-supported Web versions of Office applications," which he characterizes as "Microsoft's attempt to fend off a growing number of free Web-based office apps, including Google Docs and Zoho."
The regular versions of Office 2010 will cost between $99 and $499. If you pay that you can also access "more complete Web versions" of the apps, Fitzgerald says.
Perhaps not coincidentally, as industry observer Tom Krazit reports, Google has "made some under-the-hood changes to its Google Docs product, promising faster service and real-time collaboration tools."
