My Speech Rec Presentation at InfoQ NY

The slides and video for my speech recognition presentation are up now at the InfoQ site. Feel free to watch it and laugh at my demo fail.

My PhoneGap Day US Talk on Speech Recognition

Back in July I went out to Portland to talk at PhoneGap Day US. The video has just become available so I figured I would post it up here. The talk I did at PhoneGap Day EU is very similar to this one with a bit of updated information and mostly new jokes.

My SpeechShim for Desktop Development of Speech Recognition and TTS Apps

So I've been working on some plugins for PhoneGap to enable people to develop their apps with Speech Recognition and Text to Speech functionality. I've been following this specification and while it isn't on track to be adopted by the W3C anytime soon it does have two big benefits:

1) The speech recognition bit is already available in Chrome.
2) The specification is "sane". I guess it helps when only a couple of people are credited as authors instead of a committee.

One of the things that has been bugging me for awhile is the inability to develop these type of apps on the desktop using the same API. Yes, as I said above the speech rec bit is available in Chrome but the objects have the "webkit" prefix and there is not TTS support. So during one of the Ottawa Ruby project nights I set out to write a shim that would give everyone the ability to use the same API that will be available from the PhoneGap plugins on their desktop.

Basically that is what SpeechShim is in a nutshell. When you add speechshim.js into your web app you will be able to access the "SpeechRecogntion" object instead of needing to prefix it like "webkitSpeechRecognition". As well if you combine it with the speak.js project the speechshim.js code will add the methods necessary so you can use the SpeechSynthesis interface.

To get up and running you will need:

1. A copy of Google Chrome version 29 or higher.
2. A copy of the speak.js project from github.
3. A copy of my speechshim.js from github.

Here's an example HTML page:

and you can run the live demo here. It's nothing fancy. Just click the big button then say something. It should get updated under the button and you will hear it spoken out by the TTS. More on plugin availability for PhoneGap is coming soon.

My Speech Rec in the Browser Slides

I was able to do my presentation on speech rec in the browser at last nights Ottawa JS meeting. The slides/code for the talk have been posted up to my Ottawa-JavaScript-SpeechRec github repo. Honestly, it is a pretty light talk but that was its intention as it was going to be an amuse-bouche before heading off on holidays.

In order for you to run the question/answer part of the code you'll need to get a product key from Wolfram Alpha. Then go into index.html and find all instances of <INSERT WOLFRAM ALPHA KEY> and replace them with your api key.

Also, David grabbed a pretty good picture of me contemplating life, the universe and everything in-between right after my talk. I think it is just begging for a funny caption.

Do your worst, or best, internets.

Speaking at Decembers OttawaJS

Hey, if you are in Ottawa I'll be speaking at the next OttawaJS meeting. The meeting will be held on Wednesday December 12th at 6:30pm at the gorgeous Shopify offices. My talk is all about developing speech recognition web apps which of course is me pulling the guts of my Android app, Anna, and making it work in the browser.

It should be a good time so if you can make it out it'd be great to talk with you.

Update Twitter Using Jott

Jott has just added a new feature which allows you to update Twitter by jotting. Jotting is the process in which you call a tool free number (US only) and use speech recognition commands to complete a task.

To send a tweet your voice is recorded then processed by Jott's speech to text interpreter. Then it sends a tweet to your Twitter account. I tried it out last night and it worked quite well. The only downfall is there is no 1-800 number for Canada. In order for it to work you must call a Toronto area number so long distance fees do apply.