All the Cool Developers use Speech APIs : SDK

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!”

SAPI Documentation Errata: ISpRecoGrammar::SetRuleState

Charles Oppermann — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:46:09 GMT

There is a typo in the documentation for the ISpRecoGrammar::SetRuleState method in SAPI 5.3. The input parameters are listed as:

HRESULT SetRuleState(
   LPCWSTR       *pszName,
   void          *pReserved,
   SPRULESTATE   NewState
);

This instead it should be:

HRESULT SetRuleState(
   LPCWSTR       pszName,
   void          *pReserved,
   SPRULESTATE   NewState
);

Note that instead of "*pszName" the parameter should be "pszName".

We'll update MSDN and the Windows SDK documentation, but in the meantime we wanted to publish this errata.

Speech Content in the Windows SDK

Charles Oppermann — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:46:00 GMT

I'm happy to announce the availability of the RTM release of the Windows SDK. This release - the first RTM one since Vista - contains the following speech-related items:

Updated: SAPI 5.3 documentation
Updated: System.Speech documentation
Updated: Sample source code

8 C++ projects
3 C# projects
2 sample engines - TTS and SR

New: Grammar Compiler (GC.EXE) tool now part of the tool binaries included in the SDK

The Windows SDK completely replaces the older SAPI 5.1 SDK and supports development on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008.

Customers can download this SDK as a DVD image (1,330MB ISO file) from this location:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F26B1AA4-741A-433A-9BE5-FA919850BDBF

Or go through a guided setup process where only the components they need are downloaded. Speech is part of the base install.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E6E1C3DF-A74F-4207-8586-711EBE331CDC

I'm particularly interested in your feedback regarding the Windows SDK as a whole and in particular getting speech information.