Posts Tagged ‘nu echo’

Nu Echo releases NuGram Server Free Developer Edition and NuGram IDE 2.2

A busy day for Nu Echo, a leading speech recognition grammar development platform company based in Montreal, Canada. The company announces the availability of its NuGram Server Free Developer Edition:

One of the revolutionary features of the NuGram Platform is the ability to develop dynamic grammarsjust as easily as static grammars, using the same powerful environment and set of tools, and to deploy them as simply as JSP pages. This means that there is no longer any need for the traditionally complex, error prone, and difficult to test approaches for developing dynamic grammars. Until now, however, developers could not easily experiment with the dynamic grammar features of the NuGram Platform since, in order to do so, they were required to purchase a license of NuGram Server. With the introduction of a Free Developer Edition, this is no longer the case.

Download NuGram Server Developer Edition now!

And version 2.2 of NuGram IDE:

The most important feature introduced in this release is the support for Java to populate dynamic grammars. When using NuGram IDE, you use the exact same code to test and tune your grammar that will run in production, but without the long deployment cycle associated with stopping, deploying and restarting a Java web application. And deploying your grammars in NuGram Server is as simple as deploying JSP pages.

Speech geeks, go forth and frolic in the merry ways of grammar development!

Innovation abound in voice APIs

Dominique Boucher of Nu Echo makes a good observation in the world of voice APIs:

In fact, the new approaches are not programming models, they essentially provide low-level instructions for the various voice platforms. Much like a virtual machine. It’s up to the user of the platform to implement its own programming model on top of these instruction sets. And this is a very attractive offer, as this will most certainly ignite the development of new application programming environments and frameworks, some of which will be platform agnostic.

We lived a somewhat similar period at the end of the last century. There were many non-interoperable proprietary IVR platforms, and the industry came up with a solution: VoiceXML. Will we see something similar happen with these new approaches? I doubt it. I think that all these approaches are sufficiently similar that a good abstraction layer on the application side can suffice to support them all easily. In the 90’s, porting an application to a new platform was plainly impossible without a complete rewrite.

As we’ve seen new programming languages and paradigms flourish in recent years, it appears that the voice API space mirrors the same trend. Just as software engineers entered the “post-Java era,” we may be on the verge of a “post-VXML era”?