A Microsoft anuncia a versão beta do novo Microsoft Exchange 2010 que estará disponível para download a partir de hoje em www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010. Denominado oficialmente Exchange 2010, este novo servidor de comunicações vai estar disponível em versão final na segunda metade de 2009 e inclui novidades como o reconhecimento e síntese de fala integrados desenvolvidos em Portugal pelo Centro de I&D da Microsoft sedeado no Tagus Park - Microsoft Language Development Center, um sistema avançado de arquivo de correio electrónico e novas ferramentas para gestão da carga de mensagens na caixa de entrada e uma lista de melhoramentos para administradores de correio electrónico.

Microsoft’s 5th Annual Growth and Innovation Day took place in Brussels on March 5, 2009.The event was an opportunity of strategic importance to show to the Government leaders, industry stakeholders, academics and the media, how collaborative European Research and Development and Innovative technology, are revolutionizing the way of living of the European citizens.MLDC presented in this event the first large-scale immersive Virtual Reality system ever installed in Portugal,referred to as the CAVE-HOLLOWSAPCE of Lousal.This infrastructure is one of the largest in Europe and one of the few in the world supported by a Microsoft platform, that was developed from collaborative academic research, involving Portuguese (ISCTE,IST,FCUL) and Brazilian (PUC–Rio de Janeiro) universities. The facility is integrated in the Life Science Center of Lousal,that will open in the coming months.Speech recognition in Portuguese has been used in this facility as an effective human-computer interaction modality, aiding the user in navigation in immersive virtual environments. To see MLDC´s demonstration on this event click here.
To have more information about the EU Growth and Innovation Day visit this website.

Miguel Sales Dias, director of MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center), is the responsible editor of “Gesture-Based Human-Computer Interaction”, a Springer book of the series LNCS - Lecture Notes in Computer Science, subseries - Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 5085 LNAI. This book targeted for researchers and professionals, constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Gesture-Based Human-Computer Interaction and Simulation, GW 2007, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in May 2007. This 31 revised papers presented in this book as chapters, were carefully selected from 53 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on analysis and synthesis of gesture; theoretical aspects of gestural communication and interaction: vision-based gesture recognition; sign language processing; gesturing with tangible interfaces and in virtual and augmented reality; gesture for music and performing arts; gesture for therapy and rehabilitation; and gesture in Mobile computing and usability studies. For more information about this book click the Springer WWW site here.

The Computational Linguistics Reading Group of the "Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto" invited MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center) to present an article in the field of computational linguistics.Our Danish Language Expert, Jeppe Beck, presented a talk on "Schwa assimilation in Danish ",an extensive phenomenon that has a large impact in Danish Speech Technology.
To see the presentation and have more informations about the Computational Linguistics Reading Group click here.

MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center) is present in the new brochure made by AICEP ( Portugal Business Development Agency) to develop business and investments in Portugal. MLDC represent innovation and development producing language and Speech technologies and is an example of how modern Portugal is and how it faces the future.
To see the Portugal that Microsoft is helping to build,click here.

The XXIV Meeting of the Portuguese Linguistics Society was held at Braga on 20-22 November at the Instituto de Letras e Ciências Humanas, Campus de Gualtar, Universidade do Minho, Portugal.
MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center) presented the paper “Resolução de Ambiguidades na Normalização de Texto em Português Europeu”.Click here to have more information.

MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center) was present on the “V Jornadas en Tecnología del Habla“.This event took place from 12 to 14 November 2008 in Bilbao Spain. MLDC participated in this workshop with 2 papers and our Program Manager Daniela Braga was the Chair of Projects/demo Session.
This event was a meeting point for the communication of research results and opinion exchange on the development of Speech Technology. Visit the website of the workshop for more information.

MBDC ( Microsoft Business Division China) is the winner for the Microsoft Engineering Excellence Innovation Award for China 2008, with the Text-to-Speech (TTS) Language Expansion Platform.All Microsoft TTS Teams including MBDC and MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center), are very proud to become part of this great achievement and help Microsoft to deliver 18 new languages in 18 months.

MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center) had the pleasure to receive RTP1 (the Portuguese national TV channel).
This time, Windows Media Center commanded by speech was the topic of the interview.To see the full broadcasted article, please click here.

INTERSPEECH is an event that covers all the scientific and technological aspects of speech science and technology.This year Interspeech took place at Brisbane Australia on 22-26 September Microsoft attended this event and we are very proud to announce that we had a total of 28 papers. Of these, 10 were from Microsoft Research Speech Group, 15 from Microsoft Research Asia, 2 from Microsoft Research India and 1 from Microsoft Portugal brought by MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center).
MLDC paper title is “Automatic Word Stress Marking and Syllabification for Catalan TTS” and presents three linguistically rule-based automatic algorithms for Catalan text-to-speech conversion: a word stress marker,an orthographic syllabification algorithm and a phonological syllabification algorithm.
If you want more information about Interspeech 2008 click here

MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center) is in the second edition of "FUTURES", the Microsoft´s European Innovation Magazine.The article presented is "Interfacing with Robots:Do Robots do what we want them to do ?" and describes the joint research between MLDC and Prof.Norberto Pires from the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Coimbra in Portugal in the field of robotics and PbD systems .The basic idea of PbD systems is the possibility to program a robot just by showing what it is supposed to do and how it should do it.Speech synthesis and speech recognition are the natural technologies to achieve such level of interaction with robots.
To read the complete article please click here.

MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center) is gathering telephony speech in European Portuguese. Speech is an essential resource to the creation and development of European Portuguese recognition engines. Diversity stands as an important factor, so we need to gather all kinds of accents, ages and acoustic environments. In order to encourage participation in this speech campaign MLDC is offering 10 Xbox 360 to the participants.
If you would like to participate you just need to click here and follow the instructions on the web page.

The recent development in the areas of speech recognition and synthesis technologies, has gained a huge interest and popularity in the corporate and domestic markets.As the technology evolves,several client/desktop applications emerge,that are able to do perform automatic reading of documents and emails using the speech synthesis, and IVR telephone systems that use the benefits of speech recognition and text synthesis with good quality.Recently Microsoft has launched the "Windows Speech Recognition" in Windows Vista that enables to the users to interact with the computer using the speech and the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server, a complete IVR platform.More...

MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center) is present in the first edition of "FUTURES" the Microsoft´s European Innovation Magazine that has the brillant task to show the world innovative solutions supported by Microsoft.This article shows how an old abandoned Pirite mine in Lousal,in the Alentejo region, has become the site of the first large-scale immersive 3D Virtual Realitysystem in Portugal, supported by a Microsoft platform, referred to as the CAVE-HOLLOWSAPCE of Lousal.Speech recognition has been used in this facility as an effective human-computer interaction mechanism for navigation in immersive virtual environments and the researchers of ism for immersive systems environments and the researchers of this project have chosen to use the language pack in Portuguese produced by MLDC.To read the full article please click here. For more information on the CAVE-HOLLOWSAPCE of Lousal you can take a look in the projects session visiting this website.

The recent activities of MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center) in the scope of speech synthesis and voice recognition of Portuguese Language, the acquisition of telephone speech in 10 countries in Europe,Latin America and India and the way interaction between man and machine can be more natural,fast and efficient were the main topics
presented by SIC (Portuguese TV channel ) in this special report.You can watch it here

The second edition of the DSAI in the UTAD (Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro) brought a lot of quality work and experience in the area of the accessibility. Our congratulations to the organization, and in special to the chair, the Prof.João Barroso,for making happen an event in this area for the second time consecutive here in Portugal.
MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center) would like to thank the organization for the invitation to promote the workshop of “Speech Technology for Accessibility”, where we could show more about the speech technology that we develop at MLDC.This event allowed us to bring names with great experience in the development of solutions to improve the accessibility.All presentations are avaible here at the DSAI website

The director of MLDC (Microsoft Language Development Center) Prof.Miguel Sales Dias was interviewed by the SIC (Portuguese TV channel) for the program “Falar Global” Prof.Miguel Dias had the opportunity to explain how the interaction between Man and machines will evolve and how the speech and voice recognition will contribute for this
technological revolution, to see the full broadcasted article please click here

MLDC has developed a service based in Speech Recognition technology and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, to promote personal 1-to-1 meetings and other forms of personal contact during the 4th Ministerial eGovernment Conference in Lisbon. The “Peer Networking” platform is based in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Outlook Voice Access and allows conference delegates to easily establish contact networks between themselves, in English or Portuguese. More...

LSE (Local Software Economy Initiative) is the opportunity that Microsoft have to work hand-in-hand with governments, NGOs and Microsoft partners from across the technology industry to foster strong, self-sustaining software ecosystems,helping the communities around the world to expand their social and economic opportunities.Microsoft Portugal has signed a contract with the Portuguese National Innovation Agency (ADI),aiming at the development of the Portuguese speech R&D area as part of the Microsoft Language Development Center(MLDC).This contract reflects the importance that the Portuguese Government has in stimulating the R&D of computer-based processing of the Portuguese language.MLDC has been also working closely with the Portuguese Academia:

“Se, por um lado, o protocolo permite à Microsoft cimentar as suas relações com a universidade e aceder ao que está a ser feito nesse contexto, por outro, permite ao nosso grupo de investigação obter apoio na utilização de produtos e tecnologias Microsoft, sobretudo na vertente da língua falada, através do MLDC”, especifica. E adianta: “fazemos alguns protótipos em que usamos tecnologia Microsoft e temos possibilidade de alavancar alguns resultados quer através da utilização mais expedita da mesma, quer através da utilização de know-how, na medida em que não somos investigadores de língua falada mas de aplicações desta para interface Pessoa-Máquina”.
Joaquim Jorge, Professor Catedrático do Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Investigador-Coordenador no INESC-ID (Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores).

MLDC participated in Interspeech 2007, the biggest international scientific event on Speech Processing, to which we also contributed with a display of technology and with a scientific paper. MLDC represented Microsoft at a booth in which we presented our department, our strategy, objectives, working projects and activities, followed by several demonstrations of what we’ve been working on, including the Exchange 2007 Outlook Voice Access Beta in European Portuguese, the MicArray (a new device that uses an array of microphones to improve Speech Recognition – see Ivan’s work), our AutoAttendant (developed in OCS 2007 Speech Server), the Voice Command application localized to European Portuguese and some IVR systems that use Voice Search technology developed by Microsoft Research. We would like to thank all the participants who visited us, especially the Sig-IL community (Sig-IL – Special Interest Group on Iberian Languages). More...

The article presents the latest Center activities in the development of Portuguese Speech technology, long-term mission and vision, ongoing projects, the team, interview with the Director and partner cases-studies. This issue of the MS Magazine covers Innovation, discussing several R&D topics in Portugal. The latest version of the Microsoft Magazine can always be found here.

We are very glad to announce the first Microsoft Workshop on Speech Technology held in Microsoft Portugal, Taguspark, Porto Salvo, in the forthcoming 2nd May 2007, organized by MLDC. Reflecting the increasing interest and solid activities in speech synthesis and voice recognition of Portuguese Language, it is our pleasure to welcome both university and industry communities.
More...

Lisbon, Portugal, March 21 17h, 2007 – MLDC hosts the DEV017 session, entitled “New APIs for Speech Recognition and Synthesis for Client and Server Applications”. The speech-development technical session was rated the third-best overall session (in a total of 108 sessions) by the event participants and Pedro Silva Santos from MLDC, who gave the presentation, was rated the 7th best overall speaker (in a total of almost 100 speakers). MLDC demonstrated development of speech-enabled applications using the .NET Framework 3.0 managed SpeechFX API for client desktop apps, and the new Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server for server telephony-based IVR applications.
More...

The Microsoft Language Development Center in Portugal has developed an application that allows users to dial into a phone number and then browse the event sessions, as well as finding a particular session by speaker name or session code, entirely in Portuguese.
More...

“In the event, MLDC will host a speech-development technical session entitled “New APIs for Speech Recognition and Synthesis for Client and Server Applications”. In the session, it will be demonstrated how to develop speech-enabled applications at the client side, using the .NET Framework 3.0 System.Speech namespace, and at the server side, using Microsoft Speech Server 2007.”
More...

“Lisbon, Portugal - December 11, 2006 – At the main Business Launch of the newest versions of Microsoft’s flagships products, Microsoft Portugal showed a live demo of Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging (UM) through Outlook Voice Access, demonstrating an early prototype of Portuguese localization and support.”
More...

Este curso conta com a participação do European Institute for Design and Disability e da Design For All Foundation.
More...

"Lisbon, Portugal - November 9, 2006 - Jean-Philippe Courtois, President of Microsoft International and CEO of Microsoft EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) was in Lisbon, invited by the President of the Republic, to participate in the first meeting of the Council for Globalization promoted by COTEC and presided by Prof. Cavaco Silva. The CEO of Microsoft EMEA took part of the meeting not only to present his personal commentary to the Book “From Global to Metanational” by Prof. Pinto dos Santos, but also to weave considerations on the reasons that have dictated the success of Microsoft."
More...

Brussels, 9th November 2006, "Microsoft as a company, our research labs and associated development centres believe in investing in innovation and sharing knowledge. At this year's Innovation Day in Brussels, government leaders, academic and industry stakeholders, and the media will be given a sneak preview of the technologies of tomorrow. Researchers will demonstrate leading innovations that are being developed in partnership with European businesses and academia, spanning the areas of manufacturing, finance, retail, digital lifestyle, multimedia and entertainment."

Portuguese Innovation Agency to Fund Speech-Recognition Research and Development by Microsoft:
The Portuguese National Innovation Agency and the Microsoft Language Development Center in Lisbon have signed a contract aimed at creating a Portuguese-language speech platform.
More...

Protocol and contract signed with INESC–ID (Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa), Spoken Language Systems Lab (L2F) and Protocol signed with the Portuguese Group of Computer Graphics/Eurographics Portuguese Chapter (www.gpcg.pt), in the framework of MLDC activities, envisage the creation of R&D in the area of natural human-computer interaction using the Portuguese Language.
More...

Measure 3: Dissemination of Portuguese speech and natural language: So as to leverage the Microsoft Speech and Natural Language Development Centre recently created in Portugal for spreading the Portuguese language:
     · Efforts of the Microsoft Speech and Natural Language Development Centre in Portugal shall be extended to African countries with Portuguese as the official language, that wish to be included. (Organisation: Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
     · Microsoft shall develop a Research and Development programme at the Microsoft Language Development Center in Portugal dedicated to the computer processing of the Portuguese language. (Organisation: Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education)”
More...

· Interview RTP1
· Lesson to students event
· Government Protocol Event
· Interview Expresso
More...

“Lisbon, Portugal. — Nov. 25, 2005 —With the hiring of Miguel Salles Dias, formerly Professor of Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa, ISCTE, Microsoft today announced the first concrete step in its long-term plan to bring key language component product development to Portugal. Miguel Salles Dias will coordinate the operations of a new initiative in language-oriented human-computer interfaces at the new Portugal office of the Redmond-based development group responsible for speech & natural language group.” More...