What's Rob been up to lately?

I just realized that I've really started to slack off on posting on my blog lately and I haven't acknowledged that here yet. Nor have I said anything about why that is ... I thought I'd do a quick post this morning and let you know what's going on... But before I do that, I have to give you a bit of background...

Here at Microsoft we have several teams working on speech recognition related technologies or features right now: The Speech Components Group, Windows, Windows Mobile, Microsoft Research, the Unified Communications Group, and handful of other smaller efforts.

When I started working on speech recognition, I started 8 years ago in what is now the Speech Components Group. Shortly after finishing up the speech platform (SAPI 5.x) for release in Windows XP and Office XP, I left SCG and went over to the Tablet PC team to convince them to add speech recognition (as an end user feature) to version 1 of the Tablet PC. We didn't do as much there in Tablet for SR as I wanted, but it was a decent start. So ... I left that group and went back to the same division where SCG was (lead by Kai Fu Lee at the time) and started the team that shipped Windows Speech Recognition (WSR) in Windows Vista which shipped to consumers earlier this year.

Now ... here I was 5 months ago, right after WSR shipped in Windows Vista, thinking, "What will I do next?" Windows was getting ready to plan their next version and I had some decisions to make about what I'd do next too, and what role I'd play.

Just then, an opportunity came up to once again, go back to SCG, and work on a couple short term projects and get them out to customers during 2007 (by this fall), as well as play an important part of the planning for the next set of features and enhancements for Windows Speech Recognition. That seemed like a great thing to do, so that's what I decided to do.

But ... Because we're on a short release cycle to get things done before fall 2007, I haven't had a lot of extra time to post to my blog. Thus, only 4 posts in May, and only 7 in April. I'll eventually get back to my regular posting habits, but probably not for a couple months.

In the mean time, I better get back to work on my short term projects. "That's cool, Rob, but what exactly are these projects?" Well ... I'd tell you if I could. But right now I can't. :-) Sorry. Stay tuned, though... I'll announce here just as soon as I can what they are and how you can be a part of testing them out and playing with them once they're ready...