Second day at SpeechTEK

I've just returned from giving my second presentation on the Speech Application SDK.
The first session was OK - very busy, but I only 10 had minutes alongside 10 other
speakers, so it didn't give me much time to do it justice. In retrospect I should
probably have just presented my slides and abandoned the demo - but after all the
effort I had put into it I was kind of loathed to give up on it, and the moderator
of the session was keen for people to do demos..

However, the second presentation to the SALT forum went much better - which was a
shame, because there weren't so many people attending, although those that did were
clearly very interested in our offering.

There is a sense that the industry is holding it's breath until the Microsoft Speech
Server ships (needless to say everyone is looking for clues about a release date),
particularly as far as SALT is concerned - but the fact that both IBM and Microsoft
both now have fairly comprehensive mainstream speech authoring solutions is being
seen by many people that I speak to as validation of speech as a technology finally
coming of age.