Is there a speech recognition API for Windows Mobile? - windows-phone-7

I'd like something equivalent to the Android Speech Recognition Intent where the OS will initiate the speech recording, pass the recorded speech to a hosted cloud service for processing and return an array of strings to the calling application.
I've had a look at some docs, but it is not clear if Microsoft support this (particularly where they provide the hosted cloud recogniser service). Lots of docs refer to having to host your own server.

I'm not aware of anything available for free - I'm relatively certain Microsoft deosn't provide anything (they didn't last we looked, which was about a year ago). Chant has a variety of products. We've used them successfully under WinMo 6.5.

Related

Tango needs google web services?

our project is in China, where all google services are blocked.
does Tango need any google services, or is it self-sufficient and is able to operate on its own? if it needs services, it is basically useless to our case.
Basically,
Normal Project Tango device's features didn't need online google services.
MotionTracking, AreaLearning and Depth should do well.
you can download the sample apps sources code on here
like c samples :
https://developers.google.com/project-tango/apis/c/
try that, it won't need online google services.
But there maybe some apps which integrated Tango feature with other google services do.
Unfortunately, since Google Services is blocked in China, you can't get the BSP OTA and Play store apps updated, which means at some point you can't get new features and bugs fixed on your devices.
If you need further help. better contact project-tango-help#google.com.
AFAIK it does not. I can confirm that I've been using my devkit offline most of the time.
More generally, the core Tango services are all hosted on the device, and they were preinstalled on my devkit when I got it about 3 weeks ago. However, updates to these services come OTA via Google Play.
The three services Tango provides are motion tracking, area learning and depth sensing. Depth sensing is provided directly by the sensors, and motion tracking obviously cant be done online in a performant way. AFAIK, area learning too happens offline, but you can find more info here.

Any desktop application metric services (think Flurry for OS X)?

What are the options for desktop application metrics collection in 2013?
I know of Usermetrix and Deskmetrix, but surely they can't be the only ones? If you look at mobile analytics services the market seems to be a lot more developed.
Specifically I am looking for usage analysis (stuff like retention, crash reports, custom event reporting, version tracking.
EDIT: I should note that I'm aware of the similar questions but they're a few years old and was hoping to get an up to date picture, especially since the advent of the Mac App Store.
You should check out Trackerbird Software Analytics.
SDK is available for .NET/C++/Python and Mac OS X. Integration takes just a few minutes and apart from basic installation/usage tracking you can also use it for in-app marketing and conversion analysis.
Disclaimer: I am affiliated with the company.
While Deskmetrix seems quite nice, I ended up using Tapstream because it's free and Deskmetrix is pretty expensive.
Since Tapstream's main focus is evaluating advertisement campaigns its analytics feature is rather poor (compared to Flurry for instance). However, they allow custom event tracking.
When developing Mils, it was of great help that Tapstream supports both Mac OS X and Windows 8.
I've been successfully using Mixpanel (which has a free tier): they don't have an official Mac SDK (iOS only) but I've written a simple Obj-C wrapper for their APIs: https://github.com/swisspol/MixpanelTracker

Using Azure Service Bus (pub/sub) with Windows Phone 8

I'd like to use a cloud based pub/sub implementation on Windows Phone 8. I'm trying to connect two+ phones together (think words with friends style turn based) and I know Azure can do this, but not all the DLLs are available on Windows phone (7/8). Does anyone have good reference material for pulling off pub/sub on a Windows phone?
For broadcasting/push-type notifications, please look at SignalR (http://signalr.net/). Microsoft is making that part of the ASP.NET platform: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2012/3-034
It has some real nice functionality like gracefully, falling back on multiple mechanisms if advanced things like WebSockets are not supported by the server/client. This is an ideal solution and super scalable, since it is server based and very light on the client.

API for supporting Echo Cancellation in Windows Vista/7

In 2007, during the fever over DRM being included in Windows Vista, a Windows Vista Team blog was created to respond to a lot of the concerns. One of the questions responded to the ability of VoIP software to perform echo cancellation when running on Windows Vista.
This is what Nick White had to say by way of an FAQ:
Will echo cancellation work less well for premium content?
We believe that Windows Vista provides applications with access to sufficient information to successfully build high quality echo cancellation functionality.
What information does Windows Vista provide to allow applications to build high quality echo cancellation functionality?
Note: Reading that statement, i get the impression that Windows Vista provides sufficient information to allow applications to successfully build high-quality echo cancellation functionality. Presumably the way Windows provides this information is through an API.
Echo cancellation works by sampling the playing output, and "subtracting it" from the recorded microphone input.
Unfortunately, as MSDN notes, one cannot always sample playing output:
Windows Vista provides digital rights
management (DRM). Content providers
rely on DRM to protect their
proprietary music or other content
from unauthorized copying and other
illegal uses. WASAPI does not permit
loopback recording of digital streams
that contain DRM-protected content.
Similarly, a trusted audio driver does
not permit a loopback device to
capture digital streams that contain
protected content. Windows Vista
allows only trusted drivers to play
protected content. For more
information about trusted drivers and
DRM, see the Windows DDK
documentation.
Presumably that means that using Loopback Mode from WASAPI is not the intended method to provide echo-cancellation services.
What is the intended API to allow the implementation of high quality echo cancellation?
Note: This is related to, but separate from, another question i asked: How to sample output audio mix?. This question is specifically looking for an expansion of the response by the Window Vista team that echo-cancellation is possible in Windows. This question is looking for the API; it can be a separate question of how to use it.
Googling for an answer, i get the impression that (while performing echo-cancellation) an application is allowed to sample DRM protected content, but the content will be degraded (i.e. "sufficient information"). This would make any echo-cancellation worse, but still possible.
Or was the Windows team implying "sufficient for most cases, but not while the user is listening to a song or playing a movie" - and that it is in fact not possible to successfully build high quality echo cancellation functionality?
Update: It should be noted i'm not looking for an echo-cancellation API, i'm looking for an API to sample the playing output - which is what's required to implement echo cancellation. Unless of course Windows Vista provides an echo-cancellation API (which is how they continue to protect Premium content). But i've not seen an echo-cancellation API either.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff819492(v=VS.85).aspx
If you are looking for an API to do echo cancellation, it looks like the voice capture dsp has built in support for acoustic echo cancellation.
Example:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd443455(VS.85).aspx

Hardware-neutral library to sync with smartphones?

I'd like to know what the status is to sync data (eg. SQLite, etc.) from Windows with smartphones. Ideally, the same tool should support the main smartphones (iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android).
Google returned information on OpenSync and SyncML, and I'd like to ask experts whether those projects are ready for showtime, and if not, if there are alternatives I should look at.
It seems like it's pretty much still a proprietary world, and the easiest way is to first sync with Outlook, and then sync Outlook with the smartphone using whatever sync utility it provided.
Thank you.
There is no single protocol which is supported by all phones. The two most popular ones are ActiveSync and OMA DM.
ActiveSync is supported by virtually all modern smartphones (except BlackBerry) and can sync mail, contacts and calendars. It can also (depending on the device support) do some basic device management such as remote lock or wipe.
OMA DM is a "competing" spec which is prevalent on Symbian phones but also supported on a few others. It is SyncML based and allows syncing pretty much anything on the phone.

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