Tech-Ed 2008 Day 1
Well day 1 is over with now and it was quite exciting. There are about 6,000 developers in attendance here in Orlando and they all seem excited.
The day opened with Bill Gates doing the keynote address and he actually mentioned Speech Server. That was exciting and to make things even more exciting - there are sessions on Speech Server.
I spent the morning working in the OCS Learning Center talking with people about OCS and demoing the different components. I always find it fascinating how you can move so seamlessly from one component of OCS to another. Being able to right click in Office Communicator and share a document with someone that you are IM'ing with is awesome. Demoing the VOIP phones and Roundtable video conferencing really impresses people.
There are a lot of UC/OCS sessions as usual but one of the sessions I attended in the Unified Communications track actually demoed Speech Server. The speaker wrote a small Speech Server app and then illustrated the debugger.
Another speaker demoed an add-in for Visual Studio and Team Server that used presence to notify a manager when a piece of code was checked in. There was also a component that would notify the manager if a build failed. It used the UCMA to check the manager's presence and if they were off line it would have Speech Server handle the notification via a phone call. I got several ideas for things I could do with presence and voice apps frm today's session.
There are more Speech Serve sessions later in the week and I'll be there ready to promote GotSpeech and Speech Server. I'll also be ready to voice my opinions and hopefully clear up some of the problems you have encountered.
I'm not sure who controls the content but I'm going to see if they will let me host the sessions on GotSpeech so that you can view them. I don't know if they will buy into that or not but I'm going to try.
I'll blog again later this week as the Speech Server related sessions occur.