Cool Developers STILL use Speech APIs

Charles Oppermann — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 01:12:02 GMT

My apologies that there have been no new posts on this blog for nearly a year. Because my personal and professional lives have taken a new direction, my Microsoft blog will be closing.

I highly recommend the Speech @ Microsoft blog for more up-to-date information on Microsoft’s speech technologies.

Also, Rob’s Rhapsody is a good blog maintained by Microsoft’s Rob Chambers.

You can to email the Speech product team at Microsoft as well: listen@microsoft.com for speech recognition questions, and speak@microsoft.com for speech synthesis and Text-to-Speech (TTS) queries.

The best place for developers to get the Speech SDK samples and documentation is the Windows SDK. Download all or just part of it. You can email your SAPI related questions to sapitech@microsoft.com.

If you’re interested in contacting me personally, you can email me at chuckop@gmail.com or chuckop@live.com. Search the internet for Charles Oppermann OR ChuckOp and you’ll generally find me. I hope to hear from you!

Speech technology is incredibly enabling and is now mainstream and accepted by users. The technology is easily available to developers, so go forth and add the power of the human voice to your application!

Thank you,
Charles Oppermann
Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Bob, Windows 95, Internet Explorer 3.0, Active Accessibility, Internet Explorer 4.0/4.01, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows 2000 Active Directory Programming (author), Windows Vista, Office Communication Server 2007, Windows Speech Recognition Profile Tool, Windows 7

“A computer on every desk and in everyone home…
…usable by everyone!”

Where can I get the Microsoft Bob SDK?

Charles Oppermann — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:32:24 GMT

My friend and colleague Karin Meier is the person I work with when putting updated speech content into the Windows SDK.

She recently blogged about some odd requests she's gotten for old software. One of them was "where can I get the Microsoft Bob SDK?". I've been feeling nostalgic about Bob recently, as I visited Dan Rose's exhibit on Microsoft Bob, part of Dan's 20th Century Abandonware site.

My first job at Microsoft in 1994 was working on Microsoft Bob which was code-named Utopia. My contribution to the product was minor, but in my opinion, it never deserved the trashing it got by the industry and pundits at the time and ever since. Someday I'll write more regarding what went right and what went wrong with Microsoft Bob.

In the meantime, and for a stroll down memory lane, check out Dan's website.

All the Cool Developers use Speech APIs : History

Cool Developers STILL use Speech APIs

Where can I get the Microsoft Bob SDK?