Comment Feed for Channel 9 - Giving Computers a Voice http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/Dev/App_Themes/C9/images/feedimage.png Channel 9 - Giving Computers a Voice   This article demonstrates how easy it is to enable managed applications to finally talk back using Microsoft's Speech API (SAPI). Matt Harrington Difficulty: Easy Time Required: 1-3 hours Cost: Free Software: Visual Studio Express Editions Hardware: Download: C# Download VB Download   Summary Most of us talk to our computers all the time. You wouldn't believe the things my wife says to her poor machine when something goes wrong. This article demonstrates how easy it is to enable managed applications to finally talk back using Microsoft's Speech API (SAPI). But don't worry: since you control what the application says, you can ensure it uses nicer language than my wife. SAPI SAPI is the speech API that gives applications access to speech recognition and text-to-speech (TTS) engines. This article focuses on TTS. For TTS, SAPI takes text as input and uses the TTS engine to output that text as spoken audio. This is the same technology used by the Windows accessibility tool, Narrator. Every version of Windows since XP has shipped with SAPI and an English TTS engine. TTS puts user's ears to work. It allows applications to send information to the user without requiring the user's eyes or hands. This is a very powerful output option that isn't often utilized on PCs. Three steps are needed to use TTS in a managed application: Create an interop DLL Since SAPI is a COM component, an interop DLL is needed to use it from a managed app. To create this, open the project in Visual Studio. Select the Project menu and click Add Reference. Select the COM tab, select "Microsoft Speech Object Library" in the list, and click OK. These steps add this reference to your project and create an Interop.SpeechLib.dll in the same folder as your executable. This interop DLL must always be in the same folder as your .exe to work correctly. Reference the interop namespace Include this namespace in your application. In C#, add "using SpeechLib;"; iIn VB, add “Imports SpeechLib”. call Speak() Create a SpVoice object and call Speak(): Visual C# SpVoice voice = new SpVoice();voice.Speak("Hello World!", SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags.SVSFDefault); Visual Basic voice = New SpVoicevoice.Speak("Hello World!", SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags.SVSFDefault) That's it! The downloads for this article are simple C# and VB.NET "hello world" samples to try out. Another Example One of the best uses of TTS is for audio notifications. The System Monitor sample on coding4fun is a perfect candidate to be TTS-enabled. It informs a user when a particular system event has occurred through a message box, system tray balloon tip, or email. I'll use its extensible notification infrastructure to add TTS to this list. First, create an interop DLL and add a reference to the namespace using the steps above. Second, add this file to the SystemMonitor project: SpeechNotifier.cs: Visual C# using System;using SpeechLib;namespace SystemMonitor.Notifiers{ class SpeechNotifier : NotifierBase { public SpeechNotifier() { _voice = new SpVoice(); } public override void Execute(string title, string message) { string text = "System monitor warning! " + title; _voice.Speak(text, SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags.SVSFDefault); } private SpVoice _voice; }} SpeechNotifier.vb: Visual Basic imports Systemimports SpeechLibNamespace SystemMonitor.Notifiers Class SpeechNotifier Inherits NotifierBase Public Sub New() _voice = new SpVoice End Sub Public Overrides Sub Execute(title As String, message As String) String text = "System monitor warning! " + title; _voice.Speak(text, SpeechVoiceSpeakFlags.SVSFDefault); End Sub Private SpVoice _voice End Sub End Class End Namespace Third, add this line in the App.config file to any monitors you want to be spoken: <notifier type="SystemMonitor.Notifiers.SpeechNotifier,SystemMonitor" />   For example: <monitor runFrequency="00:04" type="SystemMonitor.Monitors.DiskSpaceMonitor,SystemMonitor"> <settings> <setting name="driveLetter" value="C" /> <setting name="freeMegabytes" value="10000" /> </settings> <notifiers> <notifier type="SystemMonitor.Notifiers.SpeechNotifier,SystemMonitor" /> </notifiers></monitor>   This example will say "System monitor warning! Disk space low." when the space on c:\ drops below the specified value. General TTS Tips Keep it short. The voice used by the default XP TTS engine is not exactly soothing. Most users would not want to hear it speak long texts, but it often works well for conveying short, functional pieces of information. Have a preface. Many TTS apps are designed to be run in the background and speak audio when the user is focused on a different application. In this case it's helpful to let the user know the context. It wouldn't make sense if your computer randomly said "Bill Gates," but you would know what "New mail from Bill Gates" meant. Keep it "speakable." Test out the text your app intends to say. The default TTS engine has some limitations you can avoid. For example, "c:\" would be pronounced "see colon backslash". This can be avoided by speaking just "c" instead. Change defaults. The speech control panel allows the user to select the default TTS engine (for computers with more than one installed) and set the default speaking rate. Cool project ideas The TTS functionality on PCs is an under-used resource with much promise. Here are some more project ideas: GotDotNet has the source code of a few email and RSS readers. Reading the title of a message as it arrives in the background would be a great use of TTS. The System Monitor sample above just scratches the surface of event notifications. That application could be the foundation for monitoring any kind of system resource or application event. And with TTS you can let your ears do the work while your hands and eyes are busy. The It's Hot in Here coding4fun sample uses a web service to read weather forecasts. Don't bother checking a web page for the weather; just modify this app to read it with a hotkey while your eyes do more important things. TTS is great for any similar web service update application: news headlines, stock quotes, sports scores, auction prices, and more. Perhaps more importantly, that same article also introduces us to Phidgets. Upstage the guy next door by sending your Phidget battlebot into the fray with a TTS "You killed my father, prepare to die!". What's next? This article outlines how you can use TTS on PCs today. But the real story is what's coming up. WinFX will contain the fully managed API for speech. No more ugly COM interop. Developers will get all the benefits of a managed API and full intellisense support. The default TTS engine on Windows Vista (formerly Windows code name "Longhorn") is much better than the default XP engine. Check out some of the resources below for updates as Windows Vista gets closer to shipping. Resources Here's some blogs from members of the Speech Components Group at Microsoft: http://blogs.msdn.com/robertbrown http://blogs.msdn.com/texttospeech http://blogs.msdn.com/sprague Robert Brown, the Program Manager for the managed speech API describes speech technology in this Channel9 video. The SAPI documentation on MSDN contains the full SAPI documentation, including advanced TTS features. For instance, the System Monitor sample above uses basic synchronous TTS. That reduces the responsiveness of the UI while the speaking is occurring. Professional applications should use asynchronous TTS, which is described in the docs. microsoft.public.speech_tech and microsoft.public.speech_tech.sdk are news groups available to help answer any SAPI questions. The default OS TTS engine is not the only one SAPI can use. Search for "SAPI compliant TTS engine" on http://search.msn.com/. Or, check out a sample list of compliant engines at http://www.microsoft.com/speech/evaluation/thirdparty/engines.asp that we've compiled. en Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:55:02 GMT Wed, 19 Jun 2013 10:55:02 GMT Rev9 Re: Giving Computers a Voice Thank you this document helped me a lot..

posted by Prashant D

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633136752000000000 Wed, 02 May 2007 04:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633136752000000000 Prashant D Re: Giving Computers a Voice Hello! Very interesting. Thank you.

posted by Max R.

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633142800000000000 Wed, 09 May 2007 04:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633142800000000000 Max R. Re: Giving Computers a Voice cool totoring but were do u use speach to text

posted by thecobra

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633201552000000000 Mon, 16 Jul 2007 04:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633201552000000000 thecobra Re: Giving Computers a Voice Hi!

There`s a way to do that but using a Spanish TTS?

Thanks!

posted by Armando

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633238704000000000 Tue, 28 Aug 2007 04:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633238704000000000 Armando Re: Giving Computers a Voice This is a good tutorial, but is there any way to use the same funtionality on a web application.  I have built one that works fine on a local server, but when deployed to the remote server, it has problems accessing the Speechlib in the BIN folder without creating an error.

Nevin

posted by Nevin

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633296592000000000 Sat, 03 Nov 2007 04:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633296592000000000 Nevin Re: Giving Computers a Voice thank you very much but if you can send me how can i read from more languages specialy arabic and frensh.

my mail (elbanna23@yahoo.com)

thank you again

bye

posted by ahmed awad

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633300948000000000 Thu, 08 Nov 2007 05:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633300948000000000 ahmed awad Re: Giving Computers a Voice It is not easy to find good and free Text to Speech libraries for your .NET application. Even the solution

posted by Noticias externas

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633368340000000000 Fri, 25 Jan 2008 05:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633368340000000000 Noticias externas Re: Giving Computers a Voice I have worked on that but it does not have so good quality. For excellent quality there is aproject from AT&T. its free and you can use <a href="http://developeronline.blogspot.com/2008/01/text-to-speech-for-masses.html"> text-to-speech C#</a>

posted by one software developer

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633400308000000000 Sun, 02 Mar 2008 05:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633400308000000000 one software developer Re: Giving Computers a Voice @Deepak Trama:  If you know the text you're going to say, create a dictionary before hand and their lengths.

Without diving into the SAPI api, I couldn't tell you if it does or doesn't have that functionality.  Sorry.

posted by Clint

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633407184000000000 Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633407184000000000 Clint Re: Giving Computers a Voice Hi,

I'm writing an app which generates a .wav file from some text.

I need to sync some pictures with this text and present it to the user as a slide show.

'Sync' is a relative term here, I need the pictures to appear some what close to the words when they are spoken.

Is there some way (a SAPI api) which will tell me where (duration in seconds) a particular word would occur in the generated audio file.

Any ideas?

My email is zodiac.seven@gmail.com

posted by Deepak Trama

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633407184000000000 Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633407184000000000 Deepak Trama Re: Giving Computers a Voice This is a good very good article. There seems to be quite a bit of information on TTS. But, can somebody help me with STT Speech-To-Text conversions? RichardMaliwatu@hotmail.com

posted by Ritchie

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633427056000000000 Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633427056000000000 Ritchie Re: Giving Computers a Voice i want to know that is it possible to convert voice to digital signal and then to identify the speaker...

if yes then plz provide me the C# code for voice recognition...

thank you!!

posted by mehwish

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633457296000000000 Wed, 07 May 2008 04:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633457296000000000 mehwish Re: Giving Computers a Voice Thanks very much for this excellent tutorial.

Can you teach me how to choose other voices in c# ?

posted by aday

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633481488000000000 Wed, 04 Jun 2008 04:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633481488000000000 aday Re: Giving Computers a Voice does SAPI supports multi languages like german,spanish.

posted by venkat

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633505680000000000 Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633505680000000000 venkat Re: Giving Computers a Voice hi

it was so interesting article.

pleas introduce me some more example about speech recognition.I need something simple with no grammer recognition. something that just understand one word.

thanks alot

amin_mhsn@yahoo.com

amin

posted by amin

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633565296000000000 Tue, 09 Sep 2008 04:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633565296000000000 amin Re: Giving Computers a Voice Check out http://www.iSpeech.org/  The work is already done for you.  Not to mention it uses good voices and it's free.

posted by Heath

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633617172000000000 Sat, 08 Nov 2008 05:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633617172000000000 Heath Re: Giving Computers a Voice Thanks a lot for the information provided above

posted by vigneshkumar

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633747600000000000 Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633747600000000000 vigneshkumar Re: Giving Computers a Voice Easier than that complicated code above:

You can just have a textbox and a button, and on the button type:

Dim SAPI

       SAPI = CreateObject("sapi.spvoice")

       SAPI.Speak(TextBox1.Text)

and you can replace the Textbox1.Text to "Anything In parenthesis" to make SAPI say something specific when that button is clicked

posted by Matt

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633932532000000000 Sun, 08 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633932532000000000 Matt Re: Giving Computers a Voice @Mark, attempting to track this down as I'm not a SAPI expert.

posted by Clint

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633981780000000000 Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633981780000000000 Clint Re: Giving Computers a Voice Hi,

Is is possible to set an audio stream as an input to the SpeechRecognitionEngine, SpInProcRecognizer ?

This stream will NOT be a stream of fixed size. I will keep writing byte arrays to this stream one after the other.

Thanks in advance,

Mark

posted by Mark

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633981780000000000 Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633981780000000000 Mark Re: Giving Computers a Voice @Mark Yes. This is possible by implementing your own com object that implements the ISpStreamFormat interface. I don't know of any samples that demonstrate this precisely, though.

posted by Clint

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633983508000000000 Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633983508000000000 Clint Re: Giving Computers a Voice Hi,

Great tutorial. I wanted to know that can i use the british voice instead of american voice ? if yes then please let me know how ? I am using windows 7 and developing a web application on asp.net 3.5 in visual studio 2010.

Thanks in advance,

Chintan

posted by chintan

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633990420000000000 Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c633990420000000000 chintan Re: Giving Computers a Voice good man ,good job,keep it up and give programmers those things which they dont know about

posted by azqar ahmad

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c634115664000000000 Tue, 08 Jun 2010 04:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c634115664000000000 azqar ahmad Re: Giving Computers a Voice @יעל  if I translated this correctly, "How can I change the tone of speech", Not sure you can change the voice programmatically.

posted by Clint

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c634286772000000000 Thu, 23 Dec 2010 05:00:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c634286772000000000 Clint Re: Giving Computers a Voice posted by soccer football boots on sale

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c634339435930000000 Tue, 22 Feb 2011 03:53:13 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c634339435930000000 soccer football boots on sale Re: Giving Computers a Voice posted by Rubel

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c634376675310000000 Wed, 06 Apr 2011 06:18:51 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c634376675310000000 Rubel Re: Giving Computers a Voice posted by Eric

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c634414190090000000 Thu, 19 May 2011 16:23:29 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c634414190090000000 Eric Re: Giving Computers a Voice Works well in websites

posted by Raymond

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c634415279150000000 Fri, 20 May 2011 22:38:35 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c634415279150000000 Raymond Re: Giving Computers a Voice posted by Archiekins

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c634418358790000000 Tue, 24 May 2011 12:11:19 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Giving-Computers-a-Voice#c634418358790000000 Archiekins