Convopi Platform
October 27th, 2006 by 
lorne
Ideally The Conversation Piece (which I will hereby mercifully shorten to “Convopi”) would run some tiny flavor of Linux – just enough to get the job done. It would also run entirely on Open Source, BSD-licensed technology. Realistically though, we have a prototype due Nov. 20th, and I need to cut corners.
And so, as it stands Microsoft would make a killing from licenses if this product ever hit the market. We’re running Windows XP, a copy of Office 2003 (yes, just for the speech recognition engine), and .NET 3.0. I was considering Vista which has a speech recognition engine built-in, but the laptop has “only” 256MB of RAM. Vista demands 512MB before it will install. Now, that’s some serious tom foolery!
The one thing I can say about using .NET / Visual Studio 2005 is that it sure makes life easy. With its plentiful libraries and tools, it can do in 100 lines what many platforms would in 1000. Even more impressive, the learning curve lasted about 10 minutes. I swear I could train a monkey could do this. I feel a little guilty (okay, a lot guilty), but I suppose this is really the future. Software is becoming too complex for anyone to write from the bottom up.
