Even though the movies of the time presented this as something that could be easily accomplished (remember WarGames?), it never was. The one thing missing from these emulations was the ability to actually talk to the computer using natural language. Emulating intelligence was always a high priority in these games. Infocom accomplished this in its text-based adventures by using humor and even a certain amount of scripted self-awareness - for instance, the game narrator could get into moods, at times, that would affect what would happen next. Ada accomplished this by including enough flexibility so that responses to the user seemed spontaneous. A large part of this involved techniques for fooling the user, to some extent, into believing that the game he or she was playing was actually intelligent. Many of the games available in the early 80's were text-based, and great attention was paid to making text conversations with the computer both involving and immersive. It used a scripted psychiatrist's persona to rephrase anything the user typed into the terminal as a question, and then threw the question back. One of the earliest examples is Joseph Weizenbaum's Eliza, written in the mid-sixties. A chatterbox is simply an artificial personality that tries to maintain a conversation with users using pre-defined scripts. BackgroundĬhatterboxes were among the earliest applications adapted for the personal computer. Finally, it will demonstrate an extensible design that allows multiple speech recognition applications to run together at the same time. This article will also highlight some of the other gotchas you might encounter while working with the Vista managed Speech API.
SPEECH TO TEXT SOFTWARE FOR VISTA WINDOWS
I have written Sophia to run on Windows XP also, but the speech recognition will necessarily be disabled, since not all methods available through the System.Speech namespace will work on XP. I will also try to unravel some of the issues involving deploying an SR application to Windows XP rather than deploying to Vista. I will go over some tricks for making the bot personality appear more lifelike.
SPEECH TO TEXT SOFTWARE FOR VISTA HOW TO
This article provides an overview of the various features of the GrammarBuilder class, including how to build increasingly sophisticated recognition rules. This project is dedicated to them, and especially to Sophia, the youngest, for whom the application is named. Along the way, I had the help of my three children, ages 4 through 8, who often wouldn't even let me work on my computer because they were so busy playing with the demo application. I originally meant for it to be a showcase of what one can do with the System.Speech namespace, but as the project progressed, it became an obsession with how far I could push the concept of an artificial personality - what could I do to make the personality seem more real? what could I do to make it more flexible? etc. It is, at the most basic level, a chatterbox application with speech synthesis and speech recognition tacked on to it. The included Sophia project is intended to be both instructive and fun.