Windows Phone 8 to feature developer access to Voice Command features

[George P Global Moderator]

In what should be a very exciting addition for developers in Windows Phone 8, access to Voice Command (aka TellMe) should rank up there fairly high.

According to the leaked Windows Phone 8 SDK, devs can add functions in their app that use the Voice Command features, specifically customers can launch the app with a sub-command to go to a specific area of the app or execute a specific command:

"Users can use voice commands to both launch your app and execute an action. For example, a user using the Contoso Widgets app could press the Start button and say "Contoso Widgets, show best sellers" to both launch the Contoso Widgets app and navigate to a 'best sellers' page, or some other action that the developer specifies."

An example of this would be Jay adding a feature to our WPCentral app whereby you hold the Start button to access Voice Command (TellMe) and say ?WPCentral, go to reviews?.

Developers can specify the commands in the app via a VCD file?so the commands aren?t completely free-flowing and users will have to know them. Still, that?s a great feature that should speed up app launching and data retrieval. The developer can even program in phrases for other languages for localization.

Finally, developers can enable Speech-to-text within their app. Re-world example would mean you can post comments to WPCentral by tapping the microphone in the text field and speaking your comment, or you can have the app read the article post to you in case you?re presently occupied:

Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech APIs. While in the context of your application, allow users to provide input using their voice, and readout text to users via text-to-speech. Leverage cloud-based speech recognition for web search and dictation, or build more complex interactions.

http://www.wpcentral.com/windows-phone-8-feature-developer-access-voice-command-features