Speech recognition comes to the call center
The choppy cadence of her voice may not seem natural, but the interaction with the operator who answers some of T. Rowe Price's calls should be. That's because even though the operator is actually a computer system designed by IBM, it functions with ordinary spoken queries and can answer or ask questions much like a human operator would. Other companies have gone to market with speech recognition systems that allow users to speak rather than punch phone keys in a menu, but the system the investment firm is using is unique because it uses so-called natural language.
http://www.upside.com/HardwareSoftware/3b337add1.html
Judge denies music industry motion to drop suit brought by Aimster
A federal judge has denied a motion by the Recording Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and 17 companies to dismiss a lawsuit filed against them in an upstate New York court by file-sharing company Aimster, a recording industry lawyer said on Monday. U.S. district judge Lawrence Kahn on Friday refused to throw out a suit by Aimster against the major record companies. He also refused to transfer it to Manhattan, where 36 companies filed two subsequent copyright-infringement suits against Aimster. In the lawsuit filed in U.S. Northern District Court in Albany, New York, Aimster is seeking a declaratory judgment that it does not violate recording copyrights by allowing music files to be shared over the Internet.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/592207.asp?0dm=C14MT
A peek inside HP, IBM labs
Apparently by coincidence, two of computing's giants -- Hewlett- Packard and IBM -- invited the media to visit their Bay Area research labs this month. The briefing at the HP Labs, part of the company's headquarters complex in Palo Alto, came less than a week after chief executive Carly Fiorina told analysts that HP is stepping up its R&D efforts, in part to "make up for underinvestment in the mid- to late 1990s."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl....DTL&type=tech
Web sites! Banish those WinXP, IE6 smart tag blues!
Microsoft's smart tag technology can be shut off by web sites with a simple one line meta tag - which is the good news. The bad news is that it appears the tag will have to be added to everything you've already published, so it's a case of updating templates and crunching through the back catalogue. It's actually published here, way down the page, but as a number of desperate coders mailed us last week raging that they couldn't find instructions for shutting smart tags off, we suspect it may have been added recently.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19943.html
Open source terror stalks Microsoft's lawyers
When Bill Gates last week urged businesses to have their lawyers read the GPL before using open source software, it turns out he was speaking from a position of knowledge. Knowledge of having lots of lawyers, anyway, because Microsoft's legal team have clearly given themselves the most awful fright by reading the blessed thing. Evidence of their trauma was unearthed late last week by Linuxtoday, which found that the new licence agreement for the beta of Microsoft's Mobile Internet Toolkit has a whole section devoted to Open Source, which it describes as "Potentially Viral Software."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19953.html