Just about the turn of the new year, a few friends of mine
decided to start a nifty little project. It was planned (and still is) to be the biggest thing in any
of our lives. I was one of the first developers and another lad, Dante Ashton, led the product
design and implementation. I must admit, we were well over our heads with this project but we did
what we could and began to design and program out as much as we could for the application. Back in
late 2010, early 2011, we had a server spinning and bent to our will. We had an instance of Bugzilla
up and running and doing what we wanted to. We were working hard to attempt to understand what no one
else did. We did it in an open fashion. We put all of our research in a centralialized place.
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At CES 2013, Nuance Corporation demonstrated an internal version of a project quite similar to ours.
So similar to a point where it has the same exact name. Something like that could be expected, whomever read
the book “Necromancer”
will not only be connected to the name Wintermute. The project was named Wintermute
with its inital sister project SpeechControl. Its sister project was meant
to pave a way for speech recognition friendliness on Linux. Yes, Linux. I've been a open source advocate
for as long as my ~/.bash_history can go and I use Ubuntu for server and desktop purposes. I figured that since
it's a desktop that's mallable to no end, why not adapt it even more? This thought and many others in human-computer
interfacing of the KDE and Unity desktop to light.
I only ask, Nuance, why didn't you ask us before going ahead and using that name in your project? I mean, sure, we're just a few teens and adults scattered across the globe trying to build up a far-fetched yet buildable idea. But still, there's that common deceny aspect. As a software developer, this is a bit daunting. Having a company whose primary (if not sole) focus is speech recognition, we don't really stand a chance (for now, at least). I hope that in coming days, Nuance and the Synthetic Intellect Institute would be able to stand side by side, and not butt heads in attempting to provide innovative tools in the speech recognition space.
P.S: We did have a P.R. release of the project, if curious. Akshat over at OMG!Ubuntu did a nice job of covering us. Hope you enjoy it.
“One Vision. One Purpose. We Are The Synthetic Intellect Institute.”