Question

I am trying to research available voice recognition engines and SDK for developing a Windows CE voice enabled application. I’ve run across Nuance, but don’t see much of anything else. I would prefer a .Net SDK if possible, but I imagine most would be C/C++. I appreciate any suggestions. Thanks.

Answer 1

As stated in one of my comments above, we are trying a voice recognition .Net SDK from Vangard Voice Systems. It uses Nuance’s Vocon3200 voice recognition engine which is well respected and seems to work well in early testing. We’re using a cheap microphone right now and have some issues with outside noise. Hopefully that will be resolved with noise-cancelling headsets. The software model is a bit lacking in that it basically hooks into an existing non-voice application. There are some limitations due to this fact and there is a limited API accessible by the developer. Any time you try to oversimplify something like this, you make crafting a powerful solution much more difficult. With that being said, we really couldn’t find any competing product that serves our needs of a .Net SDK for voice enablement of mobile applications. They currently have a nice little niche carved out.

I would have preferred to go with Nuance’s C++ SDK (for which another company has written .Net wrappers), but the Nuance business model assumes we’re developing a product for resale and has some significant royalties involved. A real barrier for a company that wants to develop internal applications.