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The Microsoft Speech platform is used by Voice Elements for Text-To-Speech (TTS) and for Speech Recognition. Many languages are supported. License to use Microsoft Speech for TTS and Speech Recognition is included with your Windows OS license.
Microsoft stopped development on the Microsoft Speech platform in 2012. Instead of processing text-to-speech (TTS) or speech recognition (SR) on-premises, Microsoft now steers its customers to use their cloud services on Azure. Those services and other similar services on the cloud can provide excellent SR and TTS and can work in conjunction with the Voice Elements platform. However, since there is no charge for the Microsoft Speech Platform, we continue to support it as our go-to default facility for TTS and SR.
The Microsoft Speech Platform is comprised of the following:
Microsoft Speech Platform Runtime
You should have this installed on your server in order to perform speech recognition functions within Voice Elements. Voice Elements has built out support for Microsoft Speech Platform, as long as you use Microsoft compatible grammar files. These are easy to create using the methods outlined in this article: Create Microsoft Speech Compatible Grammar Files
The runtime can be downloaded at Microsoft Speech Runtime.
Microsoft Speech Language Packs
The Microsoft Speech Platform relies on different language packs in order to provide speech recognition capabilities for different languages. Microsoft Speech Platform supports 18 different languages and accents. You can download some of the more popular languages using the links below. For additional options, please contact Inventive Labs Technical Support.
German
British English
US English
Mexican Spanish
Canadian French
French
Microsoft Speech SDK
The SDK is the tookit provided by Microsoft to use the Microsoft Speech Platform. All of this functionality is built into Voice Elements. You will not need to have this installed, unless you would like to use it to create Microsoft Compatible Grammar files.
The SDK can be downloaded at Microsoft Speech Platform – Software Development Kit (SDK).
How to Install and Configure
You will need to follow the steps below to run the Microsoft Speech Platform with Voice Elements:
1) Download and install the Speech Platform Runtime.
2) ‘Download and install the appropriate Language Pack.
3) Add the settings below to your HmpElementsServer.exe.config:
<setting name="SpeechRecognitionDll" serializeAs="String">
<value>HmpElementsMicrosoftSpeech.Dll</value>
</setting>
<setting name="SpeechRecognitionType" serializeAs="String">
<value>HmpElements.Server.MicrosoftSpeech</value>
</setting>
<setting name="SpeechRecognitionNumberOfPorts" serializeAs="String">
<value>1</value>
</setting>
<setting name="SpeechRecognitionLicenseType" serializeAs="String">
<value>en-US</value>
</setting>
<setting name="SpeechEngineIpAddress" serializeAs="String">
<value>127.0.0.1</value>
</setting>
After completing the steps above you can enable speech recognition before using the Play and PlayTTS methods by setting SpeechRecognitionEnabled to true before calling them. For information on how to use the speech recognition demo application for testing, see Test Speech Recognition with Voice Elements.
Please note that SpeechRecognitionNumberOfPorts should be set to a number that is equal to or less than the number of Speech Recognition Ports for which you are licensed. You can check your license entitlements in the Voice Elements Dashboard.
SpeechRecognitionLicenseType is the culture-info for the language pack that you are using. For example, if you would like to use Mexican Spanish, this value should be set to es-MX.
Do you still have questions? If so, please contact Inventive Labs Technical Support.