I woke up this morning and realized that today is my last day at PDC. Fittingly, it's a rather dreary day outside. I hiked my way over to the conference center today (about a mile walk) and here I am! The first session I was going to go to was a hands-on lab doing some C# programming, but my brain just isn't in gear enough to do it. So I've been peeking and poking my head around the various sessions going on. The one I've spent the most time listening to is the panel session on security. It's quite interesting -- it's a discussion about how various large vendors handle security. There's people there from Microsoft, Amazon.com, PayPal, etc. It's nice to hear these various companies discuss their security strategies openly.
After the security session, I rushed over to check out the speech-enabling session. Wow, they've really improved both speech synth and recognition in Vista. I was quite excited about a lot of the new functionality, so I asked whether it was going to be available to non-.NET people and was told "Go check out SAPI 5.0 -- it's in there." Wahoo! Quite awesome stuff.
The last session I was in was the under the hood, how Avalon works session. It was interesting to see what sort of paradigms they used under the hood, and the one that interested me the most was the fact that they use a transport layer between composition of visual elements and actual rendering. That means I could have a server that is running an application, and clients would be the ones responsible for rendering the data. It would cut bandwidth down by tons, which in turn increases the throughput of all clients and so everyone runs faster. Very spiffy!
So now I'm at the wireless hotzone for the last time, waiting for my ride to come pick me up. I've posted a lot of my day to day activities, but I'll most likely be expounding on what I've seen at the conference in other blog posts. If there's anything I've touched on which you're more interested in hearing about, let me know!
Interesting. Obviously, I know you can't be certain for MS or RS, but can you comment on where Windows is going--will it be "required" that all apps use .NET someday? Will RB eventually compile to .NET bytecode instead of pseudo-native EXE like today?
>>Wow, they’ve really improved both speech synth and recognition in Vista.
Welcome to Mac OS 8.5 ;)
.NET is very heavily used in Vista. It seems that a fair amount is exposed at the low level with Win32 or COM APIs, but .NET is definately the way of the future as far as Microsoft is concerned.
And from what I've seen, the SAPI 5.0 stuff is head and shoulders over what OS X has -- Classic doesn't hold a torch to it.
OS X and Classic have lousy speech recognition and somewhat better speech synthesis. If I can understand easily Microsoft's, then it's far ahead. Any chance you could post a synthesized clip?
-- SirG3
I'll see what I can scrounge up. I can tell you that MS Sam is gone finally, and replaced by more realistic voices. And the recognition stuff is awesome. You know it's good when a few people with accents are giving the talk and the recognizer is able to figure it out. What's even cooler -- it's multilingual. So you can write your code with grammar tags and a French person can use it just as well as a German person, each using their native tounge. Very. Very. Cool. MS is pushing this stuff for telephony as well, so you can hook your app up to a phone and people can call in and use it (think order processing applications, for example).