Chapter 8. Speech Recognition

One of the key aspects of Natural User Interface (NUI) is speech recognition. The speech recognition application allows users to say any command in front of the microphone, and on the other side the computer executes a certain action depending on the recognized command. The Kinect microphone array works as an excellent input device for speech-enabled applications. This provides much better quality in audio capturing compared to a single microphone by providing noise suppression, echo cancelation, and by listening to a particular direction with the help of sound source localization.

In the previous chapter, you have seen how the Kinect SDK interacts with the microphone array and you can build an application by capturing the audio stream. While the KinectAudioSource class is envisioned primarily for streaming and processing audio, combining it with the SpeechRecognitionEngine class actually shows the power of using a Kinect microphone array.

In this chapter, you...