Vista Speech Macros Beta for Developers Released -- Visual Studio Magazine

Vista Speech Macros Beta for Developers Released

By Kurt Mackie
04/29/2008

Advanced developers who want to tell their computer what to do (literally), rather than punch keys or click on icon, may want to check out a "pre-beta" technical preview of Windows Speech Recognition Macros for Vista. The release of the technical preview was announced by the Windows Vista Team Blog on Saturday.

When speech macros are created, the user can speak a word or phrase into the PC's microphone and, if the speech is recognized, an action will be executed.

It's not exactly clear what actions this beta can carry out. Microsoft provides two demonstrations of the beta by Microsoft MVP Will DePalo showing how to program an API for the Windows Speech Recognition Macros using C++ in Visual Studio. The demo, after much work, shows text being returned at a command line prompt in response to spoken words.

Microsoft seems to have much more in mind for these macros than just returning text in response to speech. A blog post from late last year suggested users would be able to create speech macros "with no programming experience what-so-ever." Possible actions in response to an uttered word or phrase might be to "send keystrokes" and "launch programs," the blog stated. However, the coding complexity shown in DePalo's demos suggests such capabilities haven't arrived just yet -- at least in terms of having no programming experience to set up the macros.

Programmers who want to get started with the speech macros have to first run a microphone wizard to set up the system. Microsoft recommends using a headset with a high-quality microphone. You also need 1 GB of memory when running the macros with other applications.

Instead of using C++, as shown in the demos, programmers can access the built-in capabilities of the macros via JScript or VBScript, according to an MSDN post.

The current technical preview of Windows Speech Recognition Macros for Vista is available in English only. The application can be downloaded here.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.