Custom Call Routing Based on Plazes
Way cool! This guy has hacked location based routing into his Asterisk server.
Archive for September 11th, 2005
A Poke in the Eye?
Google has put up a special page to help you search Microsoft related web sites at http://www.google.com/microsoft.html. Reminds me of the pranks from the Netscape / IE battles.
Do We Need Voice Services on Skype
Aswath points out that speech rec isn’t required in systems that have keyboards, and questions the value of the recent announcement by Skype.
First, we should note that these technology platforms have two components: playout the content stored in a website and recognizing the user’s speech to decide what needs to be played next.
The latter requires an automatic speech recognition (ASR) utility. You need this to be of high quality. This where companies like Tellme excel. This is required if the medium of interaction is the standard telephone. But IM clients like Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger et al. do not require this utility. The customer can easily type in the preferences via the text window rather than speak it and then later interpreted by an ASR.
The Brothers Grimm
We took the kids to see The Brothers Grimm last night. If you’re a fan of Terry Gilliam’s films, you will love this one too. The plot is pretty simple: Will and Jake Grimm are a couple of travelling hucksters who make their living by exorcising supernatural creatures from the villages they visit. The supernatural creatures (witches, trolls and so on) are played by two actors they’ve hired. What happens, then, when they encounter a real fairy tale?
It’s full of twists, and quirky references to the actual fairy tales. Matt Damon and Heath Ledger are the brothers, which gives it the feel of a supernatural buddy movie. Although it’s a kids movie, Gilliam is true to form with lots of suprises and scares. It kept our seven year old close to his mum the whole time.
If you liked Time Bandits, or Brazil, you will love this movie too.
