Chapter 4. Simple Voice Interactions

Wouldn't it be great if you could just speak to your mobile device to ask it for information or to get it to do something? This chapter looks at simple voice interactions that allow you to do just this. Two tutorial examples will show you how to implement a query to search for information as well as a request to launch one of the apps on your device.

Speech recognition is not perfect, thus it is interesting to implement some mechanisms to choose only the best recognition results. In previous chapters, we studied how to obtain confidence measures. In this chapter, we will cover two new mechanisms: similarity measures to compare the recognized input with what the user said, and confirmations to directly ask the user if the system understood correctly.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to develop simple voice interactions to request information and carry out commands on your device. You should also be aware of how to use similarity measures and...