Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Sheng-Yao Shih

Chih-Chung Wang

Yun-Chiang Kung

Chiwei Che

Hsiang-Fu Liu

Chih-Yung Chen

Yu-Li Huang

Hung-Ju King

Peng-Jen Chen

Yun-Huan Lee

MingChieh Chang

Shu-Yu Hu

Ming-Chieh Chang

Chin-Nan Lee

Technologies are described herein for a health monitor that establishes and monitors a set of alive endpoints to be used as substitutes for a dead working window endpoints. The health monitor periodically monitors substitution endpoints. When a request manager determines that a working window endpoint is dead, the request manager sends a request to the health monitor for a substitute endpoint. The health monitor receives the request and identifies an appropriate substitution endpoint from the health monitor endpoints to provide to the request manager to substitute for the dead endpoint. The health monitor releases the identified substitution endpoint to the request manager.

Substituting window endpoints using a health monitor

A runtime capability check determines functionality supported by a client application (e.g. a browser) on a computing device. During the runtime capability check, the client application (e.g. the browser) attempts to execute different function tests to determine its capabilities. The result information from the function tests are stored. The stored result information is used by the client application during subsequent connections with the server (e.g. the cookie is passed from the mobile computing device to the server). Based on the supported functionality as determined by the stored result information, the rendering code is adapted for, generated and delivered to the computing device by the server. For example, when the client application supports the tested functionality then the server renders the content using full feature rendering. When the client application does not support all of the tested functionality then the server renders the content using limited feature rendering.

Adaptive rendering based on runtime capability check

Non-limiting examples described herein relate to processing for transcoding textual content into audio signals. In some examples, transcoding services are provided over a distributed network, for example, through an interaction between a client device and a server device. For instance, a client device may transmit a selection of a document to a server device. The server device may access a document source for the document and transcode content from the document source into speech. The server device may transmit the transcoded content to the client device, for example, where the client device may output the transcoded content. For instance, the transcoded content may be an audio file that is streamed by the client device.

Audio output of a document from mobile device

Architecture that facilitates language conversion and previewing of a message attachment in multiple different languages. The architecture can be employed in a messaging application or a personal information manager program, for example, such that the message attachment can be selected and designated for conversion into a different language, and then previewed in the different language. For example, a first language can be simplified Chinese and a second language can be traditional Chinese, such that the user can toggle the preview to view the attachment in the simplified or traditional Chinese languages. The attachment can be a word processing document, a spreadsheet document, a presentation document for the presentation of information, and/or a web feed document. Additionally, the attachment can be one of multiple attachments to the message that is selected by the user.

Viewing messages and message attachments in different languages

Architecture for playing a document converted into an audio format to a user of an audio-output capable device. The user can interact with the device to control play of the audio document such as pause, rewind, forward, etc. In more robust implementation, the audio-output capable device is a mobile device (e.g., cell phone) having a microphone for processing voice input. Voice commands can then be input to control play ('reading') of the document audio file to pause, rewind, read paragraph, read next chapter, fast forward, etc. A communications server (e.g., email, attachments to email, etc.) transcodes text-based document content into an audio format by leveraging a text-to-speech (TTS) engine. The transcoded audio files are then transferred to mobile devices through viable transmission channels. Users can then play the audio-formatted document while freeing hand and eye usage for other tasks.

Architecture that enables a user to perform manual word-breaking by phrase input. Phrase input is where the user inserts a phrase-key (or separator) as a delimiter that indicates to an editor application such as an IME (input method editor) the composition of a specific phrase when entering characters (e.g., Asian). The word-breaking is controlled by the user. The conversion quality is improved as the user knows the desired input and ambiguous cases are reduced. A phrase can be specified while the user is composing the characters. By selecting a phrase-key separator, the user can specify the composing characters before the characters are presented as a phrase. Moreover, the architecture includes a phrase prioritization mechanism wherein each phrase can be treated as a single entity and assigned a character identifier (ID), which is related to the sequence of a candidate list.

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Taipei, Taiwan

Sheng-Yao Shih