TellMe Rolls Out Better Speech Recognition And An Almost-Sexy New Voice Called Zira

Last night, as 12:01am, Tellme announced their Spring 09 upgrades to their underlying speech platform. You can read all about it here on Tellme.com.

There have been a ton of news articles about it since the announcement, but I liked what Tech Crunch said about the new Zira voice. They said it’s “almost sexy”. I never really thought about TTS voices sounding sexy, but … It made for a good article title anyway. :-)

And … BTW … My team here at Microsoft is really excited about this announcement, too, because our underlying speech technology is powering the new “better speech recognition” and the “almost-sexy new voice called Zira”.

It’s been a real pleasure working with Tellme since the acquisition. I’ve had the good fortune of going down to the Tellme offices in Mountain View regularly working with them on a variety of projects for a while now, and I’m super impressed with all the people I’ve interacted with.

In fact, I’m sitting inside Tellme’s main building typing this right now wondering where I’ll go eat lunch on Castro Street in Mountain View. Will it be Amici’s pizza, or someplace else today?