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Dragon Systems just announced a new tool kit for Dragon NaturallySpeaking called Natural XTools. Natural XTools allows developers to speech enable their application using the technology in Dragon NaturallySpeaking. All of the details are not available yet, but Natural XTools at least includes the following APIs: (1) A high-level API which is designed to make it easy for either Visual Basic programmers or C++ programmers to speech enable their applications. You can drop in ActiveX controls which are pre-speech enabled, or you can hook up existing edit controls so that they work just like the Dragon NaturallySpeaking native editor. There in an ActiveX control which allow you to place a microphone button in your application, and subroutines you can call to create grammars on the fly. (2) A low-level API based on the Microsoft SAPI speech API. This API, which is based around COM (part of OLE) allows you to program Dragon NaturallySpeaking directly at the speech engine interface which allows you more control and flexibility in the higher level API, at the expense of greater complexity. Dragon also indicated its intent to provide vocabulary building tools as part of the Natural XTools suite, but I have not seen this component yet. Natural XTools is now in beta. Dragon announced at the Demo' 98 conference that the Natural XTools code would be available for download from their web site soon. A number of companies have been using the alpha version of Natural XTools, and all the feedback has been very positive. I hope to start including some information for developers using Natural XTools on the InfoPages sometime in the future. |
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