blog tazti

It’s been a busy summer.  We’ve been working hard on tazti,  slave whips cracking over our heads to ensure our daily output of code doesn’t drop.  Nevertheless, we were able to sneak out of the “code cave” long enough to visit FanExpo in Toronto to share some ‘tazti’ new features with our Canadian friends.

One of the people who dropped by our booth was Shaun Hatton.  Shaun reports for TorontoThumbs, a site that covers and reviews video games.  Shaun, together with Jorge Figueiredo and Adam Russell comprise the TorontoThumbs Ninja Team.  Shaun chatted with us about Toronto, video games and the meaning of life.  Shuan is one of the nicest guys you’ll meet, and he very kindly wrote up tazti on TorontoThumbs.  Thanks Shaun!

Among the people we saw were Victor Lukas of G4, Leonard Nimoy, Walter Koenig, Bruce Campell, Roger Corman, Avery Brooks (DS9) and Emma Caulfield (Buffy).  We also me Hellboy, at least 4 ‘Slave Leias‘, a legion of Imperial Stormtroopers and three delectable Night Elf Lady Warriors.

Directly behind our booth was the crew from Life And Level (LnL).  LnL is a popular YouTube show.  Each episode features Josh and Johnny facing off in either a video game or a video game related competition.  The loser has to spin the “Noob” wheel.  The Noob wheel is like Wheel of Fortune except that it lists punishments (including: eating a cactus, butt darts, winner gets to staple a picture of himself to the chest of the loser etc.)  The loser suffers the punishment that is spun.  Neither Johnny nor Josh shirk any punishment on the wheel.

The competitions themselves can be novel - in one, J n J played each other in Call of Duty while wired up with electronic shock dog collars controlled remotely by crew members.  A crew member delivered an electric shock a player each time they died in game.  They staged a live event at FanExpo, but I won’t spoil what happened - you’ll have to watch it on YouTube.

The whole LnL crew are good people -Josh, Johnny, Sara and Sandra.  Josh is helping us to test our new tazti features, and blogged and twitted about it!  Thanks Josh!

To wrap up this post here are a few pics from FanExpo.  Enjoy!

team tazti

Josh of LnL at FanExpo

We want extend our good wishes to our good friend, Charles Knight, of the altsearchengines.  It’s been a great three years!

team tazti

A bit belatedly, we’ve decided to change our logo from our tried and true “rainbow” motif to something stronger and bolder.  The new logo also celebrates a new layout.  This is the first of several changes to the tazti website that will rollout over the next few weeks.

We hope you enjoy the new look.

team tazti

Here’s a callout to Ryan Dube at MakeUseOf for a great review of tazti. Thanks for taking the time to review and write about tazti!

team tazti.

With the Olympic season just ended and the election season just begun we wanted to give a shout out to all the outstanding atheletes and contenders:  Michael Phelps, Dara Torres, John McCain, Barak Obama - you are winners, all of you!

While we haven’t won any Gold, Silver or Bronze medals with Chinese writing on it, we have received the recognition of our peers through any number of blogs.  One of the more interesting is npost,  a blog devoted to entrepeneurship and startups.  We are honored that Jason Powell of npost has written a very kind post about tazti (and Voice Tech Group, Inc. (the creators of tazti) by extension).  We appreciate the shout out and the recognition in the field of entrepeneurship.

Thanks Jason!

Robert Ballard may have found the Titanic, but CTitanic found us. CTitanic is the handle under which Frank Garcia blogs for Ultramobile-pc-tips and MobilitySite. Frank found out about us during our beta, and write some nice things about us. He’s done it again for our release.  Thanks Frank!

There has been a lot happening at tazti central. Details to come when we have a few more moments of down time…

team tazti

Welcome to blogtazti.com, the new home of team tazti’s blog and musings on the state of speech recognition. We hope you like the redesign, and the improved url. More news at 11….

team tazti

I’m sitting at my desk listening to Brian Wilson’s song “Love & Mercy” on iTunes.  This song stands out in several ways.  It’s part of the soundtrack to the movie Orange County, a thoroughly enjoyable movie in which I first saw Jack Black.  While of more recent vintage, the song hearkens back in spirit to the strongest, most creative period of the Beach Boys.  Finally, it’s on Brian Wilson’s solo album entitled “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times”.

I think about this title.  Sometimes when you’re toiling away on a project for a long time, and you’re not sure of it’s reception you begin to think if it’s worth it, if people will get it.  If we’re ahead of our time.  We went through this with tazti.  Releasing software that just doesn’t have any parallel is kind of like writing an album - you have no idea if it will sink or swim, even if you have the greatest confidence in it, and put every last ounce of effort into making it as good as possible.  So it’s always nice to get feedback that people get it.  That people appreciate the work of our hands.  We got this kind of feedback today.

Team tazti would like to give a big thank you to Joseph Ferrara over at the Sellsius° Real Estate Blog for his very kind, and detailed blog entry on tazti.  (Tazti.com has already picked up some traffic  from Sellsius)  It’s clear from Jospeh’s blog that  he gets  tazti.  Not only does he get the software,  but from his comments  about  our video  he understands the power of images  and video to convey  new ideas and paradigms.  Thanks Joseph!  Joseph has a great blog, you should check it out - it’s main emphasis is on real estate, and he also talks a lot about about tech and other cool stuff.

team t

Using speech recognition is often not an intuitive exercise for people.  For this reason we created a demo video explaining and demonstrating how to use tazti. We recently noticed an uptick in the views of the demonstration video for tazti.  It looks like people are organically finding it.  We highly recommend looking at the video to get a sense of the capabilities of tazti, and also for examples how to perform searches and use some of the other features.   

Today we end the veil of secrecy and announce the release of the new version of tazti speech recognition.  A long time in the brewing, we think it’s one of the coolest, most unique apps out there.  We’ve taken the basic functionality of tazti that let you search the internet using speech recognition, and included new features that let you control the iTunes music player, Facebook and MySpace, and import your bookmarks from Delicious and web browsers and make custom commands out of them, and search your browsers’ bookmarks.  Over the next month we’ll blog on the new features, talking about what they do, tips and tricks on how to use, discuss why we included them, and talk about where we think tazti and speech recognition generally is going.

For now, though, a deep breath before the plunge.  As the late Shannon Hoon sang, “All my friends patronize me, And they say yo hey boy! Have you found what you’re looking for?”.  We think that after you download tazti, you’ll be able to say: “yeah”.

team t