Speech Command Processor

As mentioned before, one of the tasks will be to write a speech-activated command processor.  For this, I do not mean that I’ll be doing a full speech recognition engine capable of dictation.  Instead, I mean that want to do something that will be able to recognize commands, like a “Say ‘one’ for service in Swahili” menu system or telling the computer to perform some operation like “Open the pod bay doors”.

There are two reasons for this limitation:

1. I don’t need full dictation support for the application I have in mind.
2. Speech recognition sucks.

Obviously, any form of speech recognition is a highly complex task, involving in-depth knowledge of linguistics and signal processing and all sorts of related things that I know nothing about.  That is why I am very glad that I don’t have to write any of it.  You see, one of the namespaces included in .Net 3.0 was something called System.Speech.Recognition.  It looks like classes in that library will pretty much do everything for me, hopefully making this task dead simple to implement, while seeming really impressive to anyone who doesn’t know about them.