Summary

This chapter began by exploring speech recognition. You saw how to employ speech recognition using the SDK’s ready-to-use grammars. You also saw how to define simple list grammars, and then how to author an XML-based grammar. The sample for this section demonstrated how to create a voice-driven paint app, which allows the user to place shapes on a canvas using voice commands such as “Add blue circle.”

The chapter then looked at how to override the built-in speech recognition GUI to create your own custom speech recognition UI and how to recognize speech in other languages.

It then looked at voice commands, and how they can be used to launch your app and to execute custom logic within your app. You learned how to create a Weather Voice app that leverages the Yahoo! Weather service to display weather information for a location spoken via a voice command.

Finally, the chapter looked at Text-to-Speech, and you saw how to customize the speaking voice of the phone’s speech synthesizer. You looked at creating a speech script using an XML definition, which allows you to set the language, gender, and intonation of sections of speech. You also learned how to employ bookmarks in your script to provide feedback to your code during speech synthesis.