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As speech-enabled applications become a core requirement for many enterprise and commercial applications, you'll need to become familiar with the Microsoft Speech Platform.

The included Sophia project is intended to be both instructive and fun. It is, at the most basic level, a chatterbox application with speech synthesis and speech recognition tacked on to it.

This article provides an overview of the various features of the GrammarBuilder class, including how to build increasingly sophisticated recognition rules. I will go over some tricks for making the bot personality appear more lifelike. I will also try to unravel some of the issues involving deploying an SR application to Windows XP rather than deploying to Vista. This article will also highlight some of the other gotchas you might encounter while working with the Vista managed Speech API. Finally, it will demonstrate an extensible design that allows multiple speech recognition applications to run together at the same time.

Online Article: Building Speech-Enabled Applications with ASP.NET

While sleepless the other night, I was channel surfing and ran across a rerun of the 1968 science fiction classic "2001: A Space Odyssey."If you haven't seen this movie, it's definitely a must see. HAL, one of the main characters of the movie, is a slightly psychotic speech-enabled super computer. HAL is responsible for steering the Discovery spacecraft on its ill-fated Jupiter mission. As I watched the movie I was completely amazed at HAL's abilities. HAL handled press interviews, played a wicked game of chess, has varied opinions on art, controls life support, and can read lips. Not to completely destroy the movie if you haven't seen it, but I have to say that I am grateful that most of the movie's predictions aren't true. However, like the HAL of 1968, speech-enabled applications have become a core requirement for both corporate and commercial developers. In this article, I'll help you explore the Microsoft Speech Platform that comprises the Speech Application Software Development Kit (SASDK) and Microsoft Speech Server 2004. I'll also show you how you can use these technologies with Visual Studio 2003 to both build and deploy speech-enabled applications.

Windows Vista includes powerful speech capabilities, exposed through a number of new APIs that let your users interact with your apps using speech rather than with a keyboard or mouse. Robert Brown shows you how to take advantage of these APIs.

One of the coolest features to be introduced with Windows Vista is the new built in speech recognition facility. To be fair, it has been there in previous versions of Windows, but not in the useful form in which it is now available. Best of all, Microsoft provides a managed API with which developers can start digging into this rich technology. For a fuller explanation of the underlying technology, I highly recommend the Microsoft whitepaper. This tutorial will walk the user through building a common text pad application, which we will then trick out with a speech synthesizer and a speech recognizer using the .Net managed API wrapper for SAPI 5.3. By the end of this tutorial, you will have a working application that reads your text back to you, obeys your voice commands, and takes dictation.

Tutorial demonstrating how to add speech recognition and synthesis functionality to a humble text pad application.

Silence may be golden, but increasingly, applications, appliances, and other automated systems are acquiring the ability to speak. You can take advantage of text-to-speech technology to voice-enable your .NET applications.

Speech-enabled applications require specialized grammars that clearly define the types of input they're expected to parse and understand. Find out how to build grammars by walking through the process of building a grammar for an order status retrieval system that lets callers retrieve orders by voice.

A little program to exercise children math skills.

One of my favorite new features in Windows Vista is Windows Speech Recognition, which allows you to operate your computer using only your voice, including dictating text into e-mail messages or other documents. Windows Speech Recognition uses the Text Services Framework (TSF) to insert, select, and correct dictated text. TSF is a scalable framework for the delivery of advanced text input technologies. It provides a standardized method for text services—such as voice recognition, handwriting recognition, spell checkers, and Japanese Input Method Editors—to communicate with applications and text controls. In particular, TSF allows bidirectional communication between applications and text services. This means that text services can read and write to an application’s document and an application can ask a text service to perform actions such as correcting text.