I'm always very annoyed when some company calls trying to sell stuff. "Good afternoon Mr. Visser. My name is Blahblah from Blablablah inc. Can I have a minute of your time?". No you can not. I tend to get more and more rude as more of these calls happen in a week. This time however I was too quick....
"Hello Mr Visser. My name is [her name] from the Volkskrant. Can I ask you a few questions".
Oh no, I thought. Another newspaper that wants to sell subscriptions. The Volkskrant is one of my favorite newspapers, but I don't want a subscription...
"Well, I presume you're going to try to sell me a subscription, so let me cut this short by saying I'm not interested"
"No, no, I'm not selling anything, I just want to ask a few questions"
I'm still not convinced
"Well, what's it about then?"
"Well, the (Dutch) minister of Integration, Ms. Verdonk proposes to take exams for Integration (Naturalization) by using Speech Technology, and from what I've found on the internet, you know something about it..."
I blushed on the other side of the phone. Good thing she couldn't see it. We had a good conversation after that...I explained about Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, talked about what I had heard of Cepstral's services for the Department of Defense and all kinds of other applications of Speech Technology...
That's what you get for using Telemarketing too much...
