Tag Archives: exalead

Feb 10 2009
Leave a comment
Media, Research, Search, Software

Searching through video’s with speech-to-text

Speech recognition is one of those technologies which has been around for quite a while, but has not yet found it’s way to large-scale utilization in the industry. Yes, we’ve probably all talked to a computer of the airline reservation center once in our live, but I wouldn’t call that real speech recognition. You will have to choose between a couple of words, and if you say something different, they will redirect you to one of the choices anyway. This is what we call a small vocabulary speech recognition application. It is useful (I guess) but not what I think the best use case of speech technology.

The main problem researchers are facing is that each person’s style of speech is very different. And, especially if more people are in the same conversation, the speech recognition technology should be able to deal with all those different styles and vocabularies. I don’t expect it to take many more years before technology will be able to deal with those complications but there is some good news already!  Continue reading →

Tagged , , ,
Sep 25 2008
Leave a comment
Search, Software

New exalead website and product offering

Yesterday Exalead released a new website, great compliment to my colleague’s who worked on this project. I think the new site is a huge improvement compared to the old one and it provides a perfect overview of Exalead’s (new) product offering.

I really recommend to have a look at Exalead Cloudview which, in my humble opinion, defines how the future of enterprise search will look like. And, while you’re at it, give Exalead’s Desktop search a try. The new desktop version can be accessed using your webbrowser and provides you with the same handy refinement options as can be used on exalead.com.

Tagged ,
Aug 31 2008
3 Comments
Personal, Search

Leaving ilse

After 4,5 years at ilse media I have decided to leave the company and start with a new challenge. To be honest, it took me quite some time to make this decision. I’ve always loved working at ilse and I will definitively miss the atmosphere and my collegues around there. Nevertheless, I feel it’s time for a change. A short while ago, I read a blogpost by Charlene Li about the best career advice she ever got. She describes the various phases you go through while you’re on a job. Basically, her advice is to switch jobs every 18 months, be it within your current company or to another:

At a career management course for HBS alumni, I learned that a person typically gets sick of a job after 18 months. This is a natural cycle, as you go through the excitement of learning a new job, become expert at it, and then gradually, it gets routine. So the advice I got was to plan for job obsolescence every 18 months. This didn’t mean that I had to leave the company and go to a new place – it had more to do with redefining my current job first to incorporate new challenges.

I reflected this on my own situation and came to the conclusion that I indeed arrived in the phase were a lot of things become a routine. For my job, it’s crucial to stay creative and come up with new innovations so routine is often a bad thing.

So… what’s my next challenge? Together with two new collegues, we’re going to start the dutch/benelux office of Exalead. Exalead is one of the major players in the enterprise search market. I know exalead pretty well since they are providing search technology to ilse since 2006. I’m a big fan of their technology and I’m very happy to become part of the company!

Tagged , ,