I'm back on Speech!

Mwa, ha, ha, haaa!  Yes, I've (re) joined the Speech at Microsoft team (yay!) where all sorts of speech grooviness is happening, in bigger, better and cooler-than-ever ways (seriously!). 

Years ago, when I started this blog, it was to talk about speech APIs, and I'm going to return to those roots, 'coz it's cool, it's fun, it's what I work on, and judging by the page hit stats, at least some of you liked what I wrote about.

BTW, check this out.  Speech is now a top level item in the MSDN Library:

Yep, SAPI, embedded, servers and Tellme documentation, all in one place:

Also, look at the System.Speech.XXXX namespaces for the .Net Framework speech API (e.g. System.Speech.Recognition, etc).

If you’re not sure what some of these technologies are, the microsoft.com/speech site should help (it also has a nice new facelift):

It's awesome to be working on speech again.  Did I mention that?

Cheers,

/Rob

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2010
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• Anonymous
  January 23, 2010
  Thanks Travis, You bet! BTW, if anybody has any topic requests, just include them in a comment, or send them to me on this form: http://blogs.msdn.com/robertbrown/contact.aspx Cheers, /Rob

• Anonymous
  January 27, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 28, 2010
  Hi el reverendo, I'll post something with screen shots when I get a bit more time.  But here are some quick tips. If you want to control Windows with your voice rather than keyboard & mouse, or dictate email and documents, there's a speech recognition app already built into Windows 7 and Vista.  Here's an overview of what it does: http://www.microsoft.com/enable/products/windowsvista/speech.aspx If you want to write apps that use speech recognition, then code like what you looked at is the basic gist of what you'll need to do.  But if you want to issue precise commands, rather than do open dictation, there are some better ways to use it.  e.g. take a look at the GrammarBuilder class: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.speech.recognition.grammarbuilder.aspx Did you do the training session?  If so, skip the rest of this paragraph.  If not... yep, boring as it seems, it is absolutely crucial to run through the training session, so that the recognizer learns what you sound like, and to give you some practice.  If you skipped this bit, that may be why it's returning gibberish.  Let me know.  Your hunch that a very strong accent may be causing accuracy problems may also be on the mark.  The training session can compensate for this in many cases.  For example, my Australian accent does fine (although, to be fair, it's been a decade since I lived there, so my accent's softened and drifted quite a bit). Another issue may be the microphone.  If you have a headset that you use for making phone calls, it's probably fine.  But if you're just using the open speaker on your laptop or web cam, these can be pretty lousy, because they pick up all sorts of environmental noise. Let me know how you go.  If it's still not working, give me a bit more about what you're trying to do, and I'll see if I can point you in the right direction. Cheers,

• Rob

• Anonymous
  January 28, 2010
  Hey mate, I didn't even realise that you were also an australian... small world :P I had completed the training session, but just for laughs, I went through two more lots of it just now. It seems slightly improved, but still nothing usable. Basically, i intend to keep a diary, amongst other things (dont worry, i wont be spamming the world with an online rant session ;-) ), and instead of typing out lengthy diatribes, I'd come across that sample code coincidentally as I was also checking out some F# samples. I thought all my worlds had collided nicely. I tried out the sample code first, and got poor results, so I then did the vista training session, and tested out WordPad, which performed exactly the same... poorly. Thats when I came across your blog and here we are. I am using a laptop mic, so maybe I need to see if i can borrow a headset from friends to try out, and if that makes a significant difference, then buy one myself. Thanks for your advice

• Anonymous
  January 28, 2010
  Cool.  Try out the headset and see how you go.  Let me know. Which part of Oz is your accent from?

• Anonymous
  January 29, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 29, 2010
  The comment has been removed