• Bell Laboratories (Lucent Technologies) TTS system. Sound examples and an advanced interactive demo (Requires Java).
• Telia Promotor Infovox (Sweden). Sound examples in 11 languages (16bit wav-format). Demo version of Infovox 210 available.
• Digital DECtalk TTS system.
• AT&T TTS System. Sound examples and an interactive demo. Contains also some recent publications for download.
• Bellcore (Bell Communications Research) ORATOR TTS System. Sound examples in au- and wav-format.
• BT-Laboratories (British Telecom) Laureate TTS System. Sound examples and interactive demo available.
• Eurovocs multilingual text-to-speech synthesizer from Technologie & Relevalidatie. Sound examples in five languages (au-format).
• SoftVoice, Inc. SVTTS speech synthesizer. Sound examples with five different voices.
• Apple PlainTalk Speech Synthesis System. Several sound examples and free version of PlainTalk for Macintosh computers.
• The MBROLA project homepage, TCTS Lab of the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons (Belgium). Sound examples in wav-format.
• Multilingual ProVerbe Speech Engine from ELAN Informatique (based on France Telecom CNET PSOLA). Sound examples in five languages, free evaluation version, and free demonstration CD-ROM available from here.
• Eloquent Technology, Inc. ETI Eloquence TTS system. Sound examples in wav-format.
• AcuVoice, Inc. TTS software. Sound examples in 8-Bit Mu Law PCM Wave format at 8 kHz.
• Panasonic CyberTalk TTS system.
• Microsoft WHISTLER Trainable TTS System.
• SPRUCE High-Level TTS system. Developed at the Universities of Bristol and Essex. Interactive weather forecast demo.
• ASEL ModelTalker, University of Delaware, USA. Interactive demo with three voices and seven emotions.
• CSLU Speech Synthesis Research Group. Festival TTS System and Lyricos singing system demonstrations.
• SVOX German text-to-speech system, Speech Processing Group at TIK, ETH in Zurich. Sound examples and interactive demo.
• German speech synthesis system HADIFIX, University of Bonn. Sound examples and interactive demo in German.
• CHATR (Generic Speech Synthesis System), ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Laboratories, Japan. Sound examples in several languages. (Some of the text in Japanese)
• Lernout & Hauspie’s TTS/3000 Text-To-Speech product line.
• YorkTalk speech generation system under development at the University of York UK.
• IPOX All Prosodic Speech Synthesis Architecture, Institute for Perception Research (IPO) and Oxford University Phonetics Laboratory (OUPL). Sound examples.
• Mikropuhe synthesizer for Finnish, Timehouse Corporation.
• Sanosse synthesis system for Finnish

Computers to match Human Brains by 2020

American computer guru Ray Curzwiel has envisioned a new advancement that indicates that computers might have a "matching human intellect by the 2020s".

Reference:
http://www.techgadgets.in/desktops/2008/23/computers-to-match-humans-brains-by-2020/

Scientists create Harry Potter style clock that tracks family members

It seems that Harry Potter mania has hit the scientists too, for they have created a clock that helps track family members.

In the Harry Potter stories, Ron Weasley's family of pureblood wizards has a magic clock with hands assigned to each family member, indicating their location and now the new prototype device from Microsoft Research Cambridge does a similar thing.

Researchers have christened it as the 'whereabout clock,' which enables family members to trace where others are in four broad categories - 'home,' 'work,' 'school' and 'elsewhere.'

However, the creators are expecting that the general nature of the clock's locations overcomes some of the privacy problems that the researchers believe have impeded other location-based services from becoming more prevalent in the marketplace.

Source: http://news.webindia123.com/news/Articles/India/20071114/821840.html

FAPESP, Microsoft Award Approximately $500,000 in Academic Funding to Advance Research in Health, Education, Agribusiness and e-Government

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Nov. 13, 2007 — Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), also known as the State of São Paulo Research Foundation, and Microsoft Research today announced recipients of approximately $500,000 (U.S.) in funding for academic research focusing on how technology can meet the social and economic challenges of rural and urban communities in Brazil. The five winners represent the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Campinas, IME in São Paulo and University of São Paulo (USP) in São Carlos.

The selected projects propose creative and multidisciplinary approaches for advancement in the areas of computer science, health and agrarian sciences, computer engineering and linguistics. In addition, these research projects are tied together by the thread of social impact, aiming to bring about change in their associated disciplines.

Source: http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8828133082268723528

Apple launches iPhone in Germany, UK

The customers in Germany and Britain lined up to buy the iPhone as it made its European debut on Friday, with Apple Inc hoping to replicate overseas the success, music player and web browser combination phone, has seen in the United States.

In Germany, the phone went on sale at more than 700 T-Mobile shops. Apple hopes to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008, helped by the launch of the iPhone in Europe, then in Asia next year.

Source: http://www.ndtvprofit.com/homepage/storybusinessnew.asp?id=41669&template=&cache=11/10/2007%203:43:05%20PM

Supercomputing Expert Daniel Reed Joins Microsoft Research

REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 9, 2007 — Daniel A. Reed will join Microsoft Research as director of Scalable and Multicore Computing, reporting to Senior Vice President of Research Rick Rashid. Reed is an expert in high-performance computing, multicore architectures and scientific applications, as well as a leader in U.S. information technology research policy.

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/nov07/11-09SCReedPR.mspx

Speech Processing Conferences

Sites

• IEEE Signal Processing Society Conferences

2008

• ICASSP 2008, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
• INTERSPEECH 2008, Brisbane, Australia, 22-26 September 2008

2007

• ASRU 2007 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, Kyoto, Japan, December 9-13, 2007 (Due July, 2007)
• ICASSP 2007 Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, 2007, April 17-20 (Due Sept 29, 2006)
• Non-Linear Speech Processing 2007, Paris, France, May 22-25, 2007 (Due Jan 15).
• INTERSPEECH 2007 Antwerp, Belgium, August 27-31, 2007 (Due March 23, 2007)
• ITRW on Robustness, November 2007, Santiago, Chile

2006

• Interspeech 2006 — ICSLP 17th-21st September 2006, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Submission Due 7th April 2006)
• The first International Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, Aruba Marriot, December 10-13, 2006 (Submission Due July 15)
• Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition & Intrinsic Speech Variations, Toulouse, France, 20 May (Submission Due 1st Feb.l 2006)
• ICASSP'06 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing Toulouse, France May 15-19 (Submission Due October 21, 2005)
• 2006 IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, Sept. 6-8, 2006, Maynooth, Ireland (Full paper Due March 31)
• TSD 2006, Brno, Czech Republic, 11-15 September 2006 (Due March 15)
• http://research.microsoft.com/workshops/MMSP06 Victoria, BC Canada October 3-6, 2006 (Submission Due 8th April 2006)
• IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Jul 9-12, (Submission Due 31th Dec 2005)
• SPECOM, June 26-29, 2006 in St. Petersburg (Submission Due 1 March 2006)
• The 2006 ACM Multimedia Conference
• The 8th Int. Conf. on Signal Processing, Guilin, China, 16-20, 2006 (Due May 15)

2005

• *COST 278 Final Workshop - Applied Spoken Language Interaction in Distributed Environments (ASIDE2005), Aalborg, Denmark, November 10-11, 2005. (Four-page paper submission deadline, September 19, 2005)
• The First International Wireless Summit (IWS 2005)
• ICASSP2005, March 19-23, 2005, Philadelphia, PA, USA
• *Eurospeech/Interspeech 2005, September 4-8 in Lisbon, Portugal (Due April 8, 2005)
• Biennial on DSP for in-Vehicle and Mobile Systems, Portugal, September 3, 2005. (Summary due March 20, 2005)
• The First International Conference on Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction, October 22-24, 2005 Beijing, China (due March 15)
• ASRU'05 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, Cancun , Mexico, Nov. 27- Dec. 1, 2005. (due July 1, 2005)
• SPECOM 2005, 10th International Conference on Speech and Computer, October 17-19 2005, Greece (due June 27, 2005)
• *MMSP'05 IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, Shanghai, Oct. 30 - Nov 2, 2005 (Submission Due: May 1, 2005)

2004

• Special Issue on Speech Technology and Systems in Human-Machine Communicatio
• *http://www.icassp2004.org/, May 17-21, 2004, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
• SWIM: Special Workshop in Maui Lectures by Masters in Speech Processing, Maui, Hawaii, January 12-14, 2004.
• http://www.cipsc.org.cn/IJCNLP-04/ (The 1st International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing), March 22-24, 2004, Hainan, China.
• Norsig 2004, 6th Nordic Signal Processing Symposium, June 9 - 11, 2004, Espoo, Finland. (submission due February 29, 2004) (incl. Fuzzy and GA)
• EUSIPCO-2004, 12th European Signal Processing Conference, September 7-10, 2004, Vienna, Austria. www.eurasip.org (submission due January 16, 2004)
• IEEE Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing, September 29 - October 1, Siena, Italy. (submission due March 31, 2004)
• *http://www.icslp2004.org/, October 4-8, 2004, Korea (submission due April 15, 2004)
• *Robust 2004: COST278 Workshop on Robustness Issues in Conversational Interaction, August 30 and 31, 2004, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
• CARPE 2004 - The First ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences
  

2003

• *IEEE ASRU 2003 Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop
• Eurospeech2003
• *ICASSP-2003 - the 28th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Hong Kong, P R China April, 2003

2002

• Workshop: Advanced ASR for Telecom Applications sponsored by Speech Driven Multi-modal Automatic Directory Assistance
  27-29 November 2002
• *IST 2002: Partnerships for the Future or IST 2002 , Copenhagen, Denmark, 4-6 November 2002. Mainly for the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Development (FP6) by CORDIS: Information Society Technologies Programme (IST)
• The Advent of Biometrics on the Internet - A COST 275 WORKSHOP, Rome, Italy, 7-8 November 2002
• The 4th IEEE International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI'2002), in Pittsburgh, 14-16 October 2002
• *ICSLP2002, September 16-20, DENVER-COLORADO, USA
• ICSP02
• ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Interactive Dialogue in Multi-Modal Systems, 2002
• ICASSP2002
• *Norsig 2002, NORSIG (Norwegian Signal Processing Society)
• The CHI 2002 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems will take place in Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 20-25, 2002.

• Robustness in Speech Based Interfaces: Sharing the Tricks of the Trade A CHI 2002 Workshop, Sunday April 21

2001

• Workshop on Information Presentation and Natural Multimodal Dialogue
• *ASRU2001 - Home Page
• *WPMC'01
• *Eurospeech 2001 - Scandinavia
• Advanced in Multimodal Interfaces - online proceeding on ICMI 2000, Beijing, China, October 2000
• Workshop on Robust Methods for Speech Recognition in Adverse Conditions, 1999, in Finland

Source: http://kom.aau.dk/~zt/pages/links_speechConf.htm