About me

I think it's appropriate to start this blog off with a bit of backround about me:
what I do, how I got here, and why I'm blogging.

What I do

I'm a Dev Lead working on the Speech Application SDK. We're responsible for the tools
that are used to author, debug and tune speech enabled ASP.NET web applications designed
to run on the forthcoming Microsoft Speech Server.

How I got here

I used to work in the pro-audio industry as a dev lead on a Windows based digital
audio workstation product called SADiE. Music is one of my passions, so I had great
fun doing this for a number of years. All good things come to an end though, so eventually
I moved to Entropic, a startup in Cambridge working on speech recognition.

Entropic were acquired by Microsoft at the end of 1999. I've continued to work on
basically the same thing since starting at Entropic, but it has morphed a number of
times along the way to become the Speech Application SDK.

Why I'm Blogging

We've just launched the first beta of the Microsoft Speech Server, and Speech Application
SDK beta 3, and people are really starting to explore the technology. There are lots
of really exciting things happening here as we move towards launching a v1 product,
and I'm hoping to chronicle some of that here as well as provide a place where I can
talk about some of the cool things you can do with speech and the Speech Application
SDK.