Tobin Coziahr, from Tellme, has been kind enough to write a post describing how you can use the Tellme VoiceXML studio environment to build prototype voice applications. Thanks Tobin!

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Tellme, a Microsoft subsidiary, has a fully featured VoiceXML studio environment that allows anyone to learn how to make voice applications powered by the Tellme platform, for free.

Head over to the getting started section to hear examples of functioning voice applications, and try out the VoiceXML scratchpad, which allows you to write your own VXML, and then immediately call an access number and try it out.  There’s a great code library for you to look at tutorials and sample code, as well. 

There’s even a Visual Studio 2008 plugin that gives you a powerful GUI interface to design and develop voice applications using Microsoft’s Visual Studio Domain Specific Language toolkit.

Sign up for a Tellme Studio account today!

Tobin Coziahr

Senior Software Design Engineer

As we have for the past 2 years, Microsoft is once again proud to announce our sponsorship of the 2009-2010 AVIOS Speech Application Programming Contest. Last year, winners of the contest received some pretty cool prizes from Microsoft, like copies of Visual Studio Professional, XBOX 360s, and Zunes... That's in addition to being flown out to San Diego for the Awards Ceremony at the Voice Search 2009 Conference. This year, Microsoft's offering similar prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize.

Do you have what it takes to win the 2009-2010 Contest? If you think you do, check out the official rules and how to use Microsoft Speech offerings here.

Congratulations to the Response Point team for winning one of the InfoWorld 2009 Technology of the Year Awards!

Microsoft overall won 4 out of 40 awards announced earlier this week:

• Response Point won Best Small Office VoIP System.
• Small Business Server 2008 won Best Small Business Server
• Visual Studio 2008 won Best Integrated Development Environment
• Silverlight 2 won Best Rich Internet Application Platform

Congrats to the Response Point team and to all the teams at Microsoft for the 4 wins...

If you are a software developer wanting to incorporate speech recognition and voice output into your application, we have sample source code that can get you started.  We have samples for the native Speech API (SAPI) and the managed System.Speech namespace (Recognition and Synthesis).

The samples are part of the Windows SDK and the most recent versions were included in the Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1.

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.

To get the samples, customers can download this SDK as a DVD image (1,330MB ISO file), or go through a guided setup process where only the components they need are downloaded.  Speech is part of the base install.

More Information:

• Speech Content in the Windows SDK from the Speech API blog
• Windows SDK Team Blog
• Speech SDK Discussion Group (web view or news reader)

We often get requests for lists of availiable speech commands in Vista applications.  The challenge for most people is that when given these lists they can only rememeber a few commands for few applications. To address this challenge we employ

“Say what you can see” as the basic principle behind the Windows Speech Recognition (WSR) UI in Vista.

Of course sometimes you can see a control but you don’t know what it’s called, for example this is the case with the playback controls in Windows Media Player.  To find out what these controls are called you can hover the mouse over them or you can say “show numbers”.  You can then speak the number of the desired control followed by the word “OK” and the control will be activated as well as displaying the name of the control in the speech recognition notification area.  

Typically if there is text associated with a control or action you can speak any sub string and have the control activated.  In the event that there’s ambiguity regarding what control you want to activate the system will highlight the possible controls and ask you to say the number of the desired control followed by the word “OK”.

For more details on how to get the most out of Windows Speech Recognition (WSR) please consider taking the tutorial.

I'll close with one special consideration (beyond general SR limitations) that might cause you difficulties. If the system isn't always recognizing what you've said it’s possible that you aren't waiting long enough for WSR to interrogate the application to obtain all of it's commands.  The blue doughnut in the Windows Speech control indicates that it is still obtaining information from the application.  While the blue doughnut is present, not all commands will be available.  And finally, be sure that command or item you are trying to speak is visible. If you can't see it you can't say it!

I get a lot of questions about dictation in Windows Speech Recognition for Vista.  One of the most frequent questions is why dictation doesn't work in a particular application.  The short answer is that dictation relies on a technology called Text Services Framework to interact with applications.  If the application doesn't support it, then dictation doesn't work well.  There is a very basic form of dictation support that can be activated when you check 'Enable Dictation Everywhere' in the Options submenu of the speech recognition context menu (right-click on the speech recognition UI).

 What applications support Text Services Framework? Well, I know that the following applications definitely support Text Services Framework:

• Microsoft Word 2003, 2007 (possibly XP; I haven't tried it)
• Wordpad
• Notepad
• Microsoft Publisher 2003 and 2007 (I haven't used earlier versions)

I also know that the following applications do NOT support Text Services Framework:

• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft Powerpoint
• Microsoft Works
• Microsoft Word 2000 and earlier

Dictation should work in any program that uses plain text controls or richedit controls, as well.

In my earlier post about how to download and install SR languages for Vista, I somehow neglected to mention what languages are supported.  Not surprisingly, we got some questions about this.

Q: What languages is Windows Speech Recognition available in?

A: For Speech Recognition, this info is available on the page on www.microsoft.com that talks about the feature: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/speechrecognition.mspx.  It says "Windows Speech Recognition is available in English (U.S.), English (U.K.), German (Germany), French (France), Spanish (Spain), Japanese, Chinese (Traditional), and Chinese (Simplified)."  It is not possible to extend this support in Vista.  If you have a recognizer for another language, you can use it in other applications, but not in Windows Speech Recognition.

For TTS, Vista ships with US English and Chinese (Simplified) synthesizers.  The Narrator screen reader (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/accessibility.mspx#narrator) does support other languages and other engines.

So, you might ask, why the difference?  Well, Windows Speech Recognition includes lots of grammars that have to be localized into each language.  Localizing the grammars is reasonably difficult, and will result in errors that need to be found through testing the integrated system.  Since we didn't have engines in languages other than those mentioned above, we had no way to find and fix issues and verify that grammars in other languages were correct.  Without being able to test, we can't ship, and without being able to ship there is no point in going through the effort in the first place.

Narrator, on the other hand, doesn't have anything complex that needs localizing, just strings.  Localizing strings is part of the standard Windows localization process, so Narrator can support any language you have a TTS engine in.