June 2007 Entries

MSDN July: Text Services Framework

Most of what I do with speech recognition centers around very limited grammars, designed to improve recognition accuracy in noisy environments. We also have a requirement to support XP, since most of our users are on Tablet PCs running XP SP2. The latest issue of MSDN Magazine (not online yet) has an interesting article by Eric Brown on using the Text Services Framework to provide full-featured dictation in apps running on Vista. Among other features, TFS looks like an interesting approach to the ......
Posted On Wednesday, June 13, 2007 4:42 PM | Comments (0)

Steve Milroy rocks!

We had Steve Milroy (Microsoft RD and MVP) speak to the Northern Colorado .NET SIG last night. Steve gave a great presentation on Virtual Earth, including a great overview of the capabilities and features. There's some very cool, very powerful pieces to the VE API. Indeed, in many situations, I'd far prefer the VE API to some of the enterprise-level GIS APIs I've used in the past. For those interested in learning more about VE, Microsoft has one of the best API documentation/demo/tutorial sites I've ......
Posted On Tuesday, June 12, 2007 2:36 PM | Comments (0)

Make sure the speech API is installed

This should go without saying, but I've had recent problems with people not understanding this concept.

If you're using System.Speech in Windows XP, you need to make sure that the speech recognition engine from SAPI 5.1 is installed.

If you're deploying an application, make sure you include the SAPI 5.1 merge module in your installer.

Posted On Tuesday, June 12, 2007 1:47 PM | Comments (0)

[Update] June issue of VIsual Studio Magazine

Well, it's official -- the June issue of Visual Studio Magazine is out. I have the cover article in this issue, in which I discuss System.Speech, showing the use of dynamically-generated custom grammers for data collection applications.
Posted On Tuesday, June 12, 2007 2:09 AM | Comments (1)