Grammar Library and Applications Features

The Speech Application SDK (SASDK) includes a rich voice mode grammar library as well as the following two kinds of applications:

• Sample applications, which demonstrate specific tasks and components
• Reference applications, which demonstrate full application implementation

Highlighted features of the library and applications included in the SASDK are outlined below. For more complete descriptions, see the Grammar Libraries, and SASDK Sample and Reference Applications topics in the SASDK Help documentation.

Highlighted Features

• A Rich Voice Mode Grammar Library
  The SASDK includes a rich voice mode grammar library that contains a robust set of rules written in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)-approved Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) format, which helps developers obtain abstract, complex concepts from the user. For example, gathering something as basic as a recognizable date input is quite complex because the way in which users express dates is highly variable. The voice mode grammar library enables the application to make an intelligent determination of the exact date and year.

• Sample Applications
  The SASDK includes 14 sample telephony applications and one sample multimodal application, that demonstrate how to perform specific tasks, and how to use specific components of the SASDK. The multimodal application demonstrates the use of Basic Speech Controls, and the telephony applications demonstrate uses of Dialog Speech Controls and Application Speech Controls. For example, the multimodal sample can run on both desktop and Windows Mobile-based Pocket PCs (Pocket PC) and demonstrates the use of the Listen and Prompt control classes. The telephony applications run using Microsoft Telephony Application Simulator (a tool that enables developers to simulate using a telephony application on a server running Telephony Application Services), and demonstrate uses of the QA, SemanticMap, Command, SpeechControlSettings, ListSelector, and DataTableNavigator control classes, among others, and tasks such as obtaining a phone number, using dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF) input, and constructing natural-sounding prompts.

• Reference Applications
  The SASDK includes two reference applications. These are fully functional applications that demonstrate best practices using the Microsoft Speech Application Platform. These reference applications are:

  • The Contacts Reference Application, which allows a caller to say a person's name and obtain information such as an e-mail address, phone number or office address from a database of contacts. It is a highly flexible and configurable application that allows developers to remove or add services from within the application.
  • The Banking Alerts Reference Application, which demonstrates a notification-by-telephone service for customers of a fictitious bank. It provides developers with a flexible, configurable starting point for developing their own telephony notification service application. The infrastructure for Banking Alerts can be reused as a reference architecture for a number of outbound dialing scenarios such as: bidding alerts, server outages, stock price notifications, and presence-awareness among others.

  Banking Alerts illustrates how developers can integrate with Microsoft SQL Notification Services (SSNS) for generating notifications. Banking Alerts also has an updated voice user interface (VUI).