The Microsoft Speech Application SDK (software development kit) consists of tools based on the SALT specification. Using the SDK, developers incorporate speech functionality into Web applications quickly and easily. The programming interface and tools fully integrate into the Visual Studio developer environment, and include speech extensions that equip Internet Explorer to support both voice-only and multimodal interaction.
The Microsoft Speech platform includes:
Speech recognition and synthesis engines
SALT-enabled Internet Explorer / Pocket Internet Explorer for multimodal applications
Telephony Application Services
SALT Interpreter. This component deals with all the speech interface/presentation logic (voice input and output). It also handles interactions between the speech application and the architecture's telephony components - for example, directing telephony instructions embedded in the SALT markup to the call control software.
Media and Speech Manager. Handles requests, made by SALT interpreters to Speech Engine Services, for speech recognition and prompt playback, and manages interfaces with the third party Telephony Interface Manager to deliver audio to and from the telephone user.
SALT Interpreter Controller. Manages the creation, deletion, and resetting of the multiple instances of the SALT interpreter that manages dialogs with individual callers.
Speech Engine Services
Speech Recognition Engine. The speech platform supports any SAPI speech recognition engine and any text-to-speech engine.
Prompt Engine. The Prompt engine joins pre-recorded prompts from a database and plays them back so that the user hears a human voice.
Text-to-Speech Engine. When prerecorded prompts are unavailable, the text-to-speech engine synthesizes audio output from a text string.
