“Hot, Cool, Retooled” is the theme of the SpeechTEK Conference and Exhibition running August 1 through 4 in New York City. It will feature an interactive hands-on demo lounge where attendees can explore the speech technologies that are reshaping consumer electronics in PDAs, games, mobile phones, and other handheld devices.

Approximately 100 exhibitors will display their wares at the 11th annual SpeechTEK show, which will also host over 75 educational sessions. Featured sessions include:

• Vertical market workshops covering utilities, financial, services, healthcare, retail, and others
• An advanced speed technology symposium “for engineers and implementers to explore recent technological advancements in conversational speech technologies”

• A conference on sourcing speech services, “a must-attend for enterprise and carrier executives (CMOs, CTOs CIOs) looking at options for outsourcing self-service . . . and also [for] application developers and solutions providers ready to mix and match speech-enabled, network-based resources.”

Back at the “Hot, Cool and Retooled” Demo Lounge, here's a preview of some applications on display:

• Cepstral will demonstrate its small footprint text-to-speech (TTS) voices running on embedded Linux, Windows CE, Symbian, and Palm OS.
• IBM will demonstrate its WebSphere Multimodal Environment, developed to “help users escape from the jungle of remote controls.”
• Kirusa will showcase several multimodal speech applications, including a stock transaction application, a messaging application and an application that lets a user “play an interactive uame using their voice as a 'third han' to find hidden words in a grid.”
• Loquendo will present its “assistive” applications for the visually impaired, based on the company's latest multilingual embedded technologies and “expressive” text-to-speech on mobile phones and PDAs.
• The SpeechWorks division of ScanSoft will demonstrate its SpeechPAK TALKS screen reader application, which converts the displayed text oo a cellular handset into speech, “providing extensive feature accessibility for blind and visually impaired individuals as well as greater convenience for all users.”
• Spoken Translation will demonstrate its Converser for Healthcare, which it touts as “the world's first two-way, cross-lingual, interpretation product for a PC tablet.” With it, users can input data by typing, handwriting or speaking, then receive a translation from Spanish to English or visa versa, either in speech or displayed text.
• VoiceSignal will feature its speaker-independent speech recognition software for mobile devices, including VSuite for voice dialing and voice commands, and VoiceMode voice-to-text input.

Further details on SpeeckTEK are available on the conference's website.

 
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