Really interesting use of intents and entities. I feel like some of this is reinventing the wheel, since there is already a grammar specification, but novel use of intents/entities. https://www.w3.org/TR/speech-grammar/
Yeah, in my experience no one uses or supports that specification, which is a shame because if you're using something like AWS Connect with AWS Lex for telephony IVR, you can't just create a grammar and then have AWS Lex figure out how to turn its recognized speech-to-text into something that matches a grammar rule. Thus, Lex will return speech-to-text results that are according to general English grammar rules, rather than what you might have prompted the user to reply with. You'll be unpleasantly surprised if you think that defining a custom entity as alphanumeric always prevents the utterance "[wʌn]" as sometimes matching "won" instead of "one" or "1".
Edit - Sorry, I realize that's a tangent. What I'm saying is that when I was evaluating speech to text engines for things like IVR systems using AWS and Google, neither of them supported SRGS. Microsoft does, I think, but they didn't have a telephony component, and IBM was ignored from the get go, so "no one" really means "two very large companies."
Some do, some don't, sure. Google STT for example supports class tokens natively. There are also services like uniMRCP that allow for certain SRGS grammar features to be used with Google STT, but they are limited in what constructs they support. I've worked pretty extensively with a platform called Verbio, and they fully support the SRGS grammar specification. I work in conversational AI, and when I do implementations, I have to evaluate the complexity of the use case and whether or not a full grammar will be needed and choose a STT provider based on that.
My templating language was inspired by JSGF, which seems to have informed the ABNF version of the W3C Speech Grammars. I don't support probabilities, though, since those are derived during the n-gram model generation.
I would have preferred to use a standard. Perhaps this is something for a future version.
Is Excel Online still as slow as it used to be a couple of years ago? I remember reading (perhaps here on HN) about how it basically spun up a headless Excel instance for each user since they couldn't extract and decouple all the functionality necessary to run some of the more advanced features.
> Excel is a different world and a big-big elephant that won't likely be rewritten any years soon. Think of a code that is maintained over 30 years. Literally, developers are still maintaining code written in the 90s. Trying to bring Excel to the online world made MS create an architecture of html frontend which communicates with a dll session behind the scenes. As weird as it sounds, this dll lives as long as the browser has the spreadsheet opened. Think of it as MS raising VM for every excel file that is opened over the internet. While this is not very cost effective (saying the least) and not very performance friendly (hey ma! I made an understatement) this allowed them to move forward with Excel online very quickly by having a UI communicating with the bloatware dll that runs on the background in Azure. Summarizing Excel, it probably won't also be rewritten in js.
I am in this situation pretty frequently. Are you just a solid communicator? I know I tend to get roped into meetings because I'm good at leading meetings, while other engineers are frankly terrible at it.
But seriously, it seems to me sometimes, that having a "meeting guru" would be truly helpful sometimes... a SPOC that can filter all meeting requests by the email / 5 minutes / required vs inflated attendees / agenda / etc criteria before they even happen.
Most of those questions aren't detail specific, so someone well versed in asking them politely and choosing the appropriate action could save so much time and attention suck.
>a SPOC that can filter all meeting requests by the email / 5 minutes / required vs inflated attendees / agenda / etc criteria before they even happen.
That's the project manager's job. The more meetings they allow. The more the project suffers. The more that are missed. The less poltical power. So they need to focus on fewer quality meetings for the ICs. More meetings for the PM.
I have kids. They forget to turn off lights, mess with my thermostat, leave doors unlocked. The peace of mind of being able to remotely check/access/control all of this is great.
How did you infer how they were raising their kids or how much time they spend with their kids from that comment? To me, it sounds more like you just want to attack them.
I'm an adult, I know I forget to turn things off sometimes and it is really nice to be able to remotely check on things like if a light is on or off or something similarly as trivial.
You obviously have very little experience with children if you think spending enough time with them will cause them to not to forget to turn out the lights.
Wow I haven't thought of Hiren's in over a decade. I used to use it daily back in my desktop support days working with XP. Very interesting to see a new version.
