Today the Applied Voice Input/Output Society (AVIOS) announced its fourth-annual student speech application contest sponsored by AT&T, Cepstral, I6Net, Loquendo, Microsoft, Opera, and Voxeo. Applications must involve speech input and/or output, but may be pure speech or multimodal. Cash and/or equipment prizes valued at more than $1,000 will be awarded to teams of student programmers who design and create applications judged to be robust, useful, creative, innovative, and user friendly.

The contest encourages students to develop applications using speech technologies, such as automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis, and to combine them with other modalities. This year, students can use any of a variety of platforms, including AT&T Speech Mashups, Cepstral VoiceForge TTS service, CMU's RavenClaw/Olympus, Google Android, I6net VXI*, Loquendo VoxNauta Platform, or LumenVox Speech Engine Standard License, Microsoft Windows and Tellme VoiceXML Platform Opera, Voxeo Prophecy, and Voxeo Tropo.Students anywhere in the world can submit creative and innovative applications to be judged by speech application experts. The contest also provides a forum for students to show what they can do with the power of speech applications. For more information and the contest entry form, go to http//:www.avios.org.