Getting started with speech programming

Question

So, you probably saw Iron Man, where Tony interacts with an AI system called Jarvis. Demo clip here (Sorry, this is commercial).

I am very familiar with C #, C ++ and Visual Basic, but I'm not sure what options I have for me to program something like this. Ideally, I would like this to help me, working on some projects, automating several things.

After a little research, I saw that many people use the Apple script. Well, I'm a window designer, and I'm working on windows, so this will not work.

Microsoft has a Speech SDK, but I heard that I can't program it to learn custom words ... since it just uses a standard library. It's true? What are the other limitations of speech recognition in the SDK? Is there anything else?

Also, which language is better to use for such a project? C # or VB?

Answer 1

The .NET 3.0 System.Speech.Recognition namespace has very elegant .NET wrapper classes around the SAPI SDK. Including a grammar class for customizing recognition. As usual, any language with .NET support can use it; a specific language does not matter.