Generating natural speech remains the holy grail of text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis systems. While intelligible TTS systems are well-developed, the quest for the perfect-sounding one is still on. Remember Duplex that debuted at Google I/O 2018? This AI-powered Google Assistant famously dialed up a salon, negotiated an appointment with the staff in an intelligent back-and-forth communication, without giving away the fact that it was a machine.
AMP for Gmail: What’s in It for You?
The dust is yet to settle on Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project launched a few years ago, but here is something fresh to mull over: Google’s AMP for Gmail project. Anything from Google is reason enough to sit up and take notice, the tech giant being the chief purveyor of our Internet experience.
Building a Real-Time Trading Application with Akka
Writing real-time applications is hard; harder still, if it needs to be distributed and fault tolerant. Minimizing latency and optimizing throughput are major goals for such applications. They demand quick response times and positive user experience even in the event of a failure of an external system or a spike in traffic.
The legacy approach is to rely on external services, such as databases, queues, etc., to handle concurrent or asynchronous operations. However, this is not viable in many scenarios. Many real-time systems—such as trading or banking applications—cannot afford the long waiting times it takes to handle concurrent requests.
IoT Analytics: The New Frontier in Business Intelligence
The data engineering that precedes analytics was covered in our previous post, Data Engineering: The Heavy Lifting Behind IoT.
Among the many sobriquets that the Internet of Things has acquired, none is more expressive than the term “Internet of Insights.” Incontestably, industrial IoT’s claim to fame is the visibility it brings to previously inaccessible phenomena. The combination of IoT and cutting-edge analytics has pushed the frontiers of business intelligence, emboldening business organizations with better contextual awareness and predictive capabilities.
Passwordless Login Comes to Android with FIDO2 Certification
On February 25, 2019, Google and FIDO Alliance announced at the World Mobile Congress that they have added support for FIDO2 standard for Android devices running Android Nougat and above. FIDO Alliance is an open industry consortium focused on developing authentication standards. FIDO has been working to change the traditional password and OTP-based authentication with more secure open standards.
Data Engineering: The Heavy Lifting Behind IoT
This post is part of our continuing blog series on the Internet of Things. In our previous posts, we discussed sensors, wireless technologies in IoT, and Connected Operations: 3 IoT Scenarios.
Smart cities, self-driving cars, intelligent machines—the IoT market is exploding with “Things.” The ease with which they cross over from sci-fi to real life makes it look like a breeze, thanks in part to data engineers who do the heavy lifting behind the scenes.
WebAssembly—The Future of Web Is Here!
Non-stop advancements in web technologies have reshaped web applications in amazing ways. From simple frames with images, links, and decorated text, web apps have evolved into complex computer programs with client and server code. Modern web apps are powered by rich client-side processing and for this, there is one ubiquitous tool (JavaScript), which also gets pushed into places where it is not the right tool for the job. That developers are in a love-hate relationship with JavaScript is indeed true!
To give credit where credit is due, JavaScript has matured a lot over the years. Advanced optimization and compilation techniques have led to fast web experiences. Yet, browsers that run on JavaScript fall short of delivering the near-native performance and rich experience demanded by video games, computer-aided designs, and scientific visualization.
Which is why WebAssembly, the new open standard, is such great news.
Being Agile on a Fixed Cost and Timeline: 6 Key Learnings
In part 1 of the two-part series on Being Agile on a Fixed Cost and Timeline, I had discussed a case study based on our experience in executing an agile fixed cost project for a large US-based company. Needless to say, it was a complex project, thanks to its magnitude, the constraints on the timeline and budget, and the strict quality requirements. We had our share of learning during its execution as we found the best ways to move forward. In this follow-up post, I’ve distilled six key learnings, which, hopefully, you would find helpful while executing agile projects that have triple constraints on the scope, cost, and timeline. (more…)
Building a Streaming App: QBurst’s Journey with Baiskoafu
It was towards the end of 2017 that Baiskoafu, a client based in the Maldives, approached us to build a platform to stream and download multimedia content in Dhivehi, the Maldivian language. The client wanted the app to be a medium through which they could promote local talent and content across the globe. Apart from this key idea, they had a sizeable collection of audio and video content and a set of questions for us. How could they materialize this dream? What should the product look like? What features should be included? 2018 was a period of joint discovery and exciting development for Baiskoafu and QBurst.
Transfer Reports from Oracle NetSuite to SFTP Server in 6 Easy Steps
Oracle NetSuite, the popular all-in-one Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, offers valuable insights into business processes by means of various reports. Many clients prefer to transfer these reports to an SFTP server and through the SFTP middleware to other enterprise systems such as SAP and Salesforce. While direct transfer from Oracle NetSuite to the different systems is not impossible, it is complex and requires time-consuming logic.
SFTP makes this job of transferring files from Oracle NetSuite particularly easy because the transfer can be automated. This is done through coding by utilizing the features of SuiteScript 2.0 SFTP Module. This would require login credentials and port number of the SFTP server.