Windows Mobile and .NET Speech Server - A Natural Match
It's been less than a week since my presentation at .NET Speech Server Day here in the Boston area, but the impressions from that day are still very much in the forefront of my mind. One of the things that continues to come to mind is what a great marriage .NET Speech Server can be in a number of Windows Mobile deployments.
Over the last few years, I have had the opportunity to work with PDA deployments that have been - well, "input-hostile". In these situations, the devices were deployed for focused enterprise applications. The users of the devices were often unfamiliar with PDAs and (more importantly) stylus input. In some cases, these devices were actually the first computing platform for the users, with paper and pencil previously used for data capture. The industries I can think of included manufacturing shop floor control, inventory control and field support. In these cases, introducing the end user to a completely new and not entirely intuitive input methodology often created a number of issues. In certain cases, the application was rejected by some users as simply not being usable. Enter .NET Speech Server.
By using a speech-enabled multi-modal application using Pocket Internet Explorer, it is very possible to overcome the idiosyncrasies associated with stylus input. Speech enablement essentially -
- Provides a natural method of user interaction and data acquisition;
- Provides a truly "hands-free" option from a data input perspective (well, one hand will often need to be used to hold the device ;-))
There are, of course, still some limitations to this solution. It is a web-based solution, which limits it to "always-on" network connectivity and therefore does not support occasionally-connected scenarios. Even when connected, the amount of "data across the wire" in speech-enabled applications may restrict deployment in "bandwidth-challenged" environments.
The potential of extending existing enterprise applications using speech enablement is extremely exciting to me. I encourage all developers who work in environments where speech enablement might provide a distinct user input advantage to check out the technology more closely. You may be surprised, as I was when first introduced the Speech Application SDK, at how easy it is to leverage your .NET and Visual Studio experience to create these types of applications.