Back in January, I blogged about Project Hawaii, a research and academic outreach program sponsored by Microsoft Research in cooperation with 20 universities worldwide. Approximately 300 students at those universities are developing applications for Windows Phone 7 this semester as part of the program. These students have already come up with new and innovative scenarios by using our previously released Relay and Rendezvous services. Beginning today, they will have another cloud service in their development arsenal: a Speech to Text Service.
This new cloud service will enable Project Hawaii participants to expand their applications with options such as diction, transcription, and voice commands. Students will also be able to use the new service to integrate other complex applications, such as Microsoft Translator, into their development projects. There is one limitation: Speech to Text currently supports English only. There are no plans to expand into other languages at this time.
In addition to making this service available to our Project Hawaii students, we are also releasing sample code from an application for Windows Phone 7 as part of the software development kit (SDK). This sample will allow users to speak into a phone and get transcribed text of their words in return. Plus, we’ll be releasing an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) service for our Hawaii participants to use in the near future.
MICROSOFT RESEARCH PODCAST
AI Frontiers: The future of scale with Ahmed Awadallah and Ashley Llorens
This episode features Senior Principal Research Manager Ahmed H. Awadallah, whose work improving the efficiency of large-scale AI models and efforts to help move advancements in the space from research to practice have put him at the forefront of this new era of AI.
—Arjmand Samuel, Research Project Manager with the Microsoft Research Connections division of Microsoft Research
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