Difference between the various Microsoft Speech technologies.

Question

Hi,

I am looking to write an application that will convert speech-to-text and vice versa for a warehouse application. The main use case will be that an operator will be wearing a headset in the warehouse and sending instructions back to a server and receiving instructions from the warehouse software to pick and pack orders. We will be using a headset that is Windows Mobile powered so it can record the voice instructions and send it to a server to parse into text.

After going through Microsoft's Speech technologies, I'm still not clear on what product suite to consider for this project. I called up their Sales line and they couldn't offer any help outside of selling licenses to me.

Can someone shed some light on what these technologies provide and what recommended scenarios they cover? I'm finding the descriptions on the Microsoft website to be overlapping and they don't highlight the unique usage scenario per technology. http://www.microsoft.com/speech/developers.aspx

1) Unified Communications Managed API

2) Speech Server 2007

3) Tellme Studio

4) .NET 3.X System.Speech

4) Speech API (SAPI?)

Thanks in advance.

Surinder

Answer 1

What you are describing is the core scenario for Speech Server 2007 - think of it like BizTalk for Speech - i.e. a core engine + Speech APIs.

UC is designed more around collaboration - it integrates directly w/Exchange & allows things like Voice Mail being read to you.

Tellme is basically a Speech Engine in the cloud, so if you want cloud hosted speech, it is the way to go.

4 & 5 are for client side development, which isn't what you are describing.