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Quack.com
Quack.com was an early voice portal company. The domain name later was used for Quack, an iPad search application from AOL. History It was founded in 1998 by Steven Woods, Jeromy Carriere and Alex Quilici as a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, based voice portal infrastructure company named Quackware. Quack was the first company to try to create a voice portal: a consumer-based destination "site" in which consumers could not only access information by voice alone, but also complete transactions. Quackware launched a beta phone service in 1999 that allowed consumers to purchase books from sites such as Amazon and CDs from sites such as CDNow by answering a short set of questions. Quack followed with a set of information services from movie listings (inspired by, but expanding upon, Moviefone) to news, weather and stock quotes. This concept introduced a series of lookalike startups including Tellme Networks which raised more money than any Internet startup in history on a si ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steven Woods
Steven Gregory Woods (born June 16, 1965) is a Canadian entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding '' Quack.com'', the first popular Voice portal platform, in 1998. Woods became the head of engineering for Google Canada where he was until 2021, when he joined Canadian Venture capital firm iNovia Capital as partner and CTO, following in the footsteps of Patrick Pichette, Google's CFO who also joined iNovia after leaving Google. Career Born in Melfort, Saskatchewan, Woods holds a Ph.D. and M.Math. from the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada and a B.Sc. from the University of Saskatchewan. He was the first Ph.D. student of Professor Qiang Yang. Woods' Ph.D. was published in 1997 as a book co-written with Alex Quilici and Qiang Yang entitled "Constraint-Based Design Recovery for Software Reengineering: Theory and Experiments" He then worked for Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute on product line development a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alex Quilici
Alex Quilici is an American engineer and businessman. He is a national source of information about robocalls for consumer protection groups, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC's staff, congregational legislators and their telecom staff, and national media also look to him for information. Quilici graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and received a PhD in computer science from UCLA. From 1991 to 1999, he was a freelance technical consultant and faculty member at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Quilici was a co-founder of the Pittsburgh-based voice portal infrastructure company Quackware along with Steven Woods and Jeromy Carriere. Quilici helped bring Quack.com from being a start-up with three founders to a company which employed 125 professionals in the first 18 months. In 1999, it became Quack.com and moved to Silicon Valley; in September 2000 it was acquired by America Online, eventually becoming AOLbyPhone. Quilici joined AOL as a V ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voice Portal
Voice portals are the voice equivalent of web portals, giving access to information through spoken commands and voice responses. Ideally a voice portal could be an access point for any type of information, services, or transactions found on the Internet. Common uses include movie time listings and stock trading. In telecommunications circles, voice portals may be referred to as interactive voice response (IVR) systems, but this term also includes DTMF services. With the emergence of conversational assistants such as Apple's Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, and Samsung's Bixby, Voice Portals can now be accessed through mobile devices and Far Field voice smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home. Advantages Voice portals have no dependency on the access device; even low end mobile handsets can access the service. Voice portals talk to users in their local language and there is reduced customer learning required for using voice services compare ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tellme Networks
Tellme Networks, Inc. was an American company founded in 1999 by Mike McCue and Angus Davis, which specialized in telephone-based applications. Its headquarters were in Mountain View, California. Tellme Networks was acquired by Microsoft on March 14, 2007, for approximately $800 million; the deal closed in late April 2007. In 2006, Tellme's phone network processed more than 2 billion unique calls. Tellme established an information number which provided time-of-day announcements, weather forecasts, brief news and sports summaries, business searches, stock market quotations, driving directions, and similar amenities. Operating by voice prompts and speech-recognition software, it was set up in 2000 as a loss-leader service to demonstrate the Tellme functionality to U.S. consumers. The voice of the Tellme service is Darby Bailey. In early 2012, Microsoft divested itself of Tellme Networks' interactive voice response (IVR) service and the majority of its employees to 24_7_inc, 24/7 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Of Speech Recognition Software
Speech recognition software is available for many computing platforms, operating systems, use models, and software licenses. Here is a listing of such, grouped in various useful ways. Acoustic models and speech corpus (compilation) The following list presents notable speech recognition software engines with a brief synopsis of characteristics. Macintosh Cross-platform web apps based on Chrome The following list presents notable speech recognition software that operate in a Chrome browser as web apps. They make use of HTML5 Web-Speech-API. Mobile devices and smartphones Many mobile phone handsets, including feature phones and smartphones such as iPhones and BlackBerrys, have basic dial-by-voice features built in. Many third-party apps have implemented natural-language speech recognition support, including: Windows Windows built-in speech recognition The Windows Speech Recognition version 8.0 by Microsoft comes built into Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jeromy Carriere
Steven Jeromy Carrière is a Canadian computer software engineer. Carrière is a graduate of the University of Waterloo in Canada. He was technical staff member at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute working on practical software architectural reconstruction and analysis. In 1998 Carrière co-founded Pittsburgh-based voice portal infrastructure company Quackware with Steven Woods and Alex Quilici. In 1999 Quackware became Quack.com and moved to Silicon Valley. In September 2000, Quack was acquired for an estimated $200 million by America Online. Carrière left America Online in 2002 to co-found Web 2.0 startup Kinitos (later renamed NeoEdge Networks). In 2003, Jeromy left Kinitos to join Microsoft as a senior architect advisor. From 2005 through 2007 he worked for Fidelity Investments, in Boston, USA, in their enterprise application architecture group. Subsequent to this Jeromy went on to senior technical leadership positions with Vistaprint, Y ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Of Waterloo
The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates three satellite campuses and four affiliated school, affiliated university colleges. The university offers academic programs administered by six faculties and thirteen faculty-based schools. Waterloo operates the largest post-secondary co-operative education program in the world, with over 20,000 undergraduate students enrolled in the university's co-op program. Waterloo is a member of the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities, U15, a group of research-intensive universities in Canada. The institution originates from the Waterloo College Associate Faculties, established on 4 April 1956; a semi-autonomous entity of Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo College, which was an Affiliated college, affiliate of the University of West ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Private Company
A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose Stock, shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in their respective listed markets. Instead, the Private equity, company's stock is offered, owned, traded or exchanged privately, also known as "over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter". Related terms are unlisted organisation, unquoted company and private equity. Private companies are often less well-known than their public company, publicly traded counterparts but still have major importance in the world's economy. For example, in 2008, the 441 list of largest private non-governmental companies by revenue, largest private companies in the United States accounted for $1.8 trillion in revenues and employed 6.2 million people, according to ''Forbes''. In general, all companies that are not owned by the government are classified as private enterprises. This definition encompasses both publ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ted Leonsis
Theodore John Leonsis (born January 8, 1957) is an American businessman. He is a former senior executive with America Online (AOL) and the founder, chairman, and CEO of Monumental Sports & Entertainment, which owns the NHL's Washington Capitals, the NBA's Washington Wizards, the WNBA's Washington Mystics, and Monumental Sports Network. Leonsis graduated from Georgetown University in 1977. He has served on the board of directors at Georgetown University and also served a brief tenure as the mayor of Orchid, Florida. , he held a net worth of $2.8 billion. As CEO of Monumental Sports, he has used the threat of leaving Washington, D.C. to demand that District of Columbia taxpayers subsidize the operations of his D.C.-based teams. In 2023, Lenosis entered into an agreement with Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin to relocate the Washington Wizards and Capitals from the District of Columbia to Alexandria, Virginia at a proposed cost of $1.35 billion for Virginia taxpayers. However, Virg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Internet Bubble
The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Internet, resulting in a dispensation of available venture capital and the rapid growth of valuations in new dot-com startups. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, investments in the NASDAQ composite stock market index rose by 80%, only to fall 78% from its peak by October 2002, giving up all its gains during the bubble. During the dot-com crash, many online shopping companies, notably Pets.com, Webvan, and Boo.com, as well as several communication companies, such as Worldcom, NorthPoint Communications, and Global Crossing, failed and shut down. Others, like Lastminute.com, MP3.com and PeopleSound were bought out. Larger companies like Amazon and Cisco Systems lost large portions of their market capitalization, with Cisco losing 80% o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Speech Recognition
Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition or speech-to-text (STT). It incorporates knowledge and research in the computer science, linguistics and computer engineering fields. The reverse process is speech synthesis. Some speech recognition systems require "training" (also called "enrollment") where an individual speaker reads text or isolated vocabulary into the system. The system analyzes the person's specific voice and uses it to fine-tune the recognition of that person's speech, resulting in increased accuracy. Systems that do not use training are called "speaker-independent" systems. Systems that use training are called "speaker dependent". Speech recognition applications include voice user interfaces ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
