Our product is everywhere!

Last night I gave a presentation (PDF) on the Workflow module to the Pittsburgh Perlmongers. It went pretty well – my last-minute idea to compare a workflow to a board game seemed to register okay. It can be difficult talking about generic frameworks but I’ve found a good way is to show rather than tell, so we walked through the example shipped with the distribution. (I still ‘tell’ too much though, even with examples…)

A nice surprise was the link to my new job. Cepstral graciously hosts our meetings and their business is voice synthesis. I work for Vocollect, a company that uses Text-to-Speech and voice recognition in our core product. And on the Cepstral AV cart holding the monitor I was using for my presentation was the newest released model of that core product, the Talkman T2. Cool!

Props are always useful, so having the T2 in my hands was useful to match up with the slide labeled 'They can get complicated...' which shows a fairly complicated workflow from our Task Builder system. (There's nothing proprietary about it -- no details, names, anything like that -- it's really just there for the shock value.)