2 days to Microsoft Speech Server launch event at SpeechTek

It's been a long time since I posted. My excuse is that we've been in crunch mode working hard to get everything ready for the launch this week.

At one point in the product cycle I had mistakenly thought that things were well under control and that we'd have no trouble hitting our target dates. However, this was before we decided to take on another major new set of functionality for the Speech Application SDK to generate reports and analyzing data from Microsoft Speech Server logs (which I'll talk about elsewhere).

This has been combined with the typical madness that leads up to any sort of product lauch (final last minute discovery of bugs, trying to make sure that the demo that is going to be shown on stage when Bill speaks is water tight, and a vast number of fit and finish issues). Consequently I'm feeling rather frazzled and haven't really had time to compose my thoughts for long enough to write them down here.

However, tomorrow I'm heading to SF and it's all starting to get exciting hearing about the plans. We're expecting something like 4000 people hear Bill speak at the keynote on Wednesday. Apparently we're supplying donuts for the event - we've ordered in excess of 6000 Krispy Kremes. After Bill's keynote there will be a further keynote for the SpeechTek audience in the Metreon cinema by Kai-Fu where we'll be showcasing some of the applications developed by our partners and early adopters.

Tomorrow it will be exactly 5 years since I started heading up a team of developers to produce a set of speech application authoring tools at a small company called Entropic. When I think of the fact that 5 years later these tools are going to be launched in front of 4000 developers by Bill Gates... well it blows me away.

See you at SpeechTek/VSLive!