Windows Phone 8 in Action

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 ...