Chapter 12. Using the Speech API
This chapter covers
- Using text-to-speech and speaking voices
- Using Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML)
- Using voice commands and speech recognition
Speech is a powerful thing. We spend our first years learning how to talk and continue to do it the rest of our lives. Speaking is the preferred way of interacting with each other and sharing information. This natural interaction, when extended to mobile devices, can become second nature to users.
As the processing power available in our everyday devices continues to increase, we’ll see that talking to machines and receiving vocal responses are increasingly the norm. Microsoft recognizes this fact and has made a push to get variations of its speech technologies into multiple areas of our daily lives, including voice mail systems, PC and console gaming, automobiles, and now in our mobile devices.
With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft gave users the ability to perform basic operations using only their voices. These operations included calling and texting contacts, opening apps, and searching. Although these were useful, developers were left out of the fun and were forced to use third-party web services to enable speech features in their apps.