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Windows Phone 8 is here! Start speech enabling your apps…

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It’s time to start speech enabling your Windows Phone applications, developers!

In today’s post, I’ll kick things off by consolidating and linking to a bunch of different resources that you can use to get started. I’ll also show you a real world application, that’s not a toy / sample app, that I’ve built using the same APIs you all have access to right now. From that, you can see what’s possible in a relatively short amount of time, and hopefully it’ll inspire you to think about what you can do in your applications. Over the coming weeks, I’ll dig into that application, piece by piece, and tell you exactly how you can do the same thing. We’ll probably end up with 10-15 posts total on the topic, having covered the basics in the first few posts, and covering some of the lower level details in the ones that follow.

So … Let’s start by taking a look at that real world application. It’s called Tivo Command. Take a look at the video, here, or embedded below, then continue on with the rest of post. :-)

Finished watching the demo of Tivo Command? Does it give you some ideas of things you could do in your apps? Want to add some speech features to your app?

OK. Here we go …

First, as a developer, you might want to read Kevin Gallo’s post from Tuesday this week, where he announced the Windows Phone 8 Developer Platform’s availability. Then, you probably should take a look at the Getting Started with Development for Windows Phone 8.0 guide on the new Windows Phone Dev Center. That’s where you’ll learn where you can download the SDK and tools, register your phone as a developer, and learn how to either build your first Windows Phone application, or migrate your existing Windows Phone 7 application to Windows Phone 8.

Next up, you probably want to take a look at What's new in the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, to learn about all the cool new capabilities, like native code support, in app purchases, NFC support, custom app notifications and custom wallpaper. Of course, IMHO, the coolest feature of all of these is the new speech platform that all developers can take advantage of.

After reading the overview for Speech in Windows Phone 8, you’ll see that there are 3 main areas of investment that you can take advantage of in your apps running on Windows Phone 8: Voice Commands, Speech Recognition, and Speech Synthesis.

Last but not least, you should read thru the Speech Design Guidelines also on the Dev Center.

Of course, we also have all the APIs documented here:

That should be enough for one day, right? In upcoming posts I’ll start tearing apart Tivo Command v8 and show exactly how I added all the speech capabilities, using the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK.

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below…

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2012
    Hi Rob, Great app. However it can't connect to my TiVo. It can see my TiVo (it correctly picked up the TiVo's specific name), however it keeps saying it can't connect to it. Are there anything specific I need to do to make it connect? Could it be a router issue (ports, etc)? Also, the FAQ on the app goes to "page not found".

  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2012
    Duh, I needed to enable network remote control on the TiVo. Works great now!