newlan
How this guy used Watson to tune out of conference calls
Josh Newlan wrote a small piece of software he calls "Say What" that listens to meetings for him and alerts him if his name is called. Newlan works for Splunk, a U.S.-based machine data company, but he lives in Shanghai. "I end up having lots of early [and] late calls with the U.S. office ... hence the need for this tool," he told CNNMoney. Newlan's python script starts to run when a meeting begins and his computer's microphone listens in the background. It uses an open source speech recognition program to recognize phrases based on the silences between people's sentences.