Last week Tim Paek of Microsoft Research visited the Project54 lab at UNH. Tim and I have been collaborating for about two years now, and this summer Tim is the supervisor of my PhD student, Zeljko Medenica, during Zeljko’s summer internship with MSR.

As part of his visit Tim gave a talk on his research in the field of mobile speech interaction. The talk covered three topics. First, Tim discussed his work on the Voice Command. Tim worked on utilizing user models to reduce the semantic error rate. Next, he talked about using reinforcement learning in a voice enabled browser. Finally, Tim talked about a mobile voice search application. The application provides intuitive ways to help the search application find the right answer. One way this is accomplished is by allowing multimodal refinements to the search. E.g. the user can help the speech recognizer by typing in the first letters of a problem word in an utterance. Another way is by allowing uncertain queries in the search (you can say “something” as part of the search to indicate you’re not sure what the exact search term should be). As part of the talk Tim gave a live demo of the mobile voice search application:

The talk was very interesting and the demo was impressive - thanks Tim! For more pictures click here.

Andrew Kun

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