No,  For equal access, we'll need what we are using and if we want to  
continue to have equal access in an ever expanding richly endowed  
information environment, we'll need sometthing like jaws, window  
eyes, hal, talks, mobile speak and the large family of assistive  
technologies for quite some time to come unless one thing happens.   
It's already happened in one market, is maturing in another but  
Microsoft has yet to implement full access out of the box.

-- 
Jonnie Apple Seed
With his:
Hands-On Technolog(eye)s


On Feb 20, 2006, at 9:08 PM, George Cassell wrote:

MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) Blog
Monday, February 20, 2006

Vista's Speech Capabilities

By SYSK 63

The next version of OS (Vista) will have state-of-the-art speech  
technology
built right in. WinFX will have a powerful API for enabling your  
users to
speak to your apps and your apps to speak to your users.

At the last PDC (2005), Phillip Schmid, Robert Brown and Steve Chang  
gave a
great talk "Ten Amazing Ways to Speech-Enable Your Application",  
available
at

http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/PRS/PRSL03_files/Default.htm.

Below are some key points from the talk.

Vista will ship with 8 language speech recognizers

Vista shell is speech enabled, i.e. you can drive it without using a  
mouse
or keyboard.  If you can see it on the screen, you can say it!   
Anything you
can do with a keyboard or mouse, you can say it!

Dictation is built into OS, i.e. any application that has a text  
field can
take in dictation.  Yes, no code needed -- your application is  
automatically
dictation enabled!

System.Speech API is now part of WinFX.  Why use it?  To add more speech
enabled functionality than "what you see - you can say".  E.g. you can
speech enable deeply nested menus...

Speech Synthesizer Example:
using System.Speech.Synthesis;

SpeechSynthesizer synthesizer = new SpeechSynthesizer();

// To speak
synthesizer.SpeakText("Your sentence goes here");

// To send the output of synthesizer to .wav file
synthesizer.SetOutputToWaveFile("YOUR FILE PATH HERE");name
synthesizer.SpeakText("Your sentence goes here");

To customize speach recognition, do the following:
// 1.  Create SpeechRecognizer instance (normally, once per application)
using System.Speech.Recognition;

SpeechRecognizer speechRecognizer = new SpeechRecognizer();

// 2.  Create Grammar instance
Grammer phoneGrammer = new Grammar("YOUR GRAMMAR FILE HERE");

The grammar file is an xml file with words the speech recognizer should
understand, and their mapped actions; e.g. in a provisioning  
application,
you might have the following commands:

<rule id=PhoneCommands" scope="public">
      <one-of>
          <item> purchase new phone
<tag>synthisizerAction="PurchaseNewPhone"</tag> </item>
          <item> reuse existing phone
<tag>synthisizerAction="ReusePhone"</tag> </item>
      </one-of>
</rule>

// 3.  Load grammar into recognizer
recognizer.LoadGrammar(phoneGrammer); // note: there can be many  
grammars
loaded at the same time

// 4.  Subscribe to SpeechRecognized event
phoneGrammer.SpeechRecognized += new
EventHandler<RecognitionEventArgs>(PhoneGrammer_SpeechRecognized);

void PhoneGrammer_SpeechRecognized(object sender,  
RecognitionEventArgs e)
{
     switch((string) e.Result.Semantics["synthesizerAction"].Value)
     {
         case "PurchaseNewPhone":
             // TODO: Show new phone purchase form
             break;
         case "ReusePhone":
             // TODO: Show existing phone re-purposing form
             break;
     }
}


Now, how does Microsoft Speech Server relate to Vista's speech
functionality?
Microsoft Speech Server is about speech enabling your applications  
from the
phone.

First, let's set the stage.  For those who are not familiar with this
technology, Microsoft Speech Server acts as a digital data-to-voice
translator:

     - It interprets voice commands/data from a user and digitizes it
     - It offers digitized information as XML to a web application for
manipulation
     - It takes digital information from a web application and
'vocalizes'/'reads' it to a user.

The possibilities range from sales support (e.g. you can search for  
customer
phone numbers/addresses over the phone with your voice), to getting  
vocal
directions from MapPoint to your customer's location read to you  
while on
the road, to commerce sites allowing you to check on the order status  
of an
online purchase, get an ETA, and even to change the destination shipping
address, to being able to record a message for a person and have it  
sent via
email attachment via Exchange.  Not to mention unprecedented support for
developers to create friendly web applications for more easy access  
to the
visually impaired.

The future version of Speech Server will use the same API, as one  
exposed in
Vista, for extending the reach of your .NET applications to the  
telephone.

The SDK is available now, and can be used with VS 2005!

Published Wednesday, February 15, 2006 7:00 AM by irenak

http://blogs.msdn.com/irenak/archive/2006/02/15/532530.aspx


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