Customer Reviews

Pro Microsoft Speech Server 2007: Developing Speech Enabled Applications with .NET (Expert's Voice in .NET)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've had this book for about two weeks now and it is one of the best books I've read in a while.

one of the biggest problems with previous versions of speech server was that there was very little available on it. Dunn's book fixes that with the new release of Office Communications Server/Speech server.

Having worked through all the examples, everything works as advertised. The examples are relevant and real-world without being too complex to follow. It's an easy read and the writing style is relaxed, professional yet makes you want to keep reading.

Overall the book is small and can be worked through quickly. But even though it's small, it gives you everything you need to feel more than comfortable with the product and so far, I certainlyl haven't come across anything important that wasn't covered in the book.

Considering how easy to read it is, this book is excellent for any developer, whether or not they want to actually start writing speech apps or not. It works great for getting you acquainted and works equally well if you are trying to build complex speech applications.

Very well done.

Book is very straight forward and concise on the programming side of using speech server. If that's all your looking for then an excellent book.

However it's missing how to setup and integrate speech server into a telephony environment. Which there are books on using Office Communications Server 2007 on that, but there should be some attention on how to configure an environment to get all the examples working. IMO this is a big missing section to an otherwise good introduction to xyz technology book. If you just follow the install guidelines in the book you will only be able to do inbound applications. All the outbound examples will fail to work until you properly configure at least an OCS 2007 SE server with Mediation Server on it and configure your IP PBX to talk to it

This book was good to figure out what speech server is and how to develop simple applications. I would have liked to see a bit more of a deep dive in the Worfklow Foundation interaction. There are some gotchas with respect to how you manage state accross different users that should have been covered more in depth.

As opposed to so many technical books these days that are filled with fluff this book gets straight to the point and tells you how to use Speech Server 2007. Even though it is small in comparison to the over inflated books that tend to dominate the market, it does not waste any time with useless graphics or tables.

I have been working with Speech Server since the original 2004 version was in beta, but I learned a lot about Speech Server by reading this book; especially the last chapter which covered creating speech applications for Vista and the chapter on using Exchange 2007 auto attendants and creating a Unified Messaging speech application.

I really liked the way it covered material relating to migrating applications from Speech Server 2004 to the new 2007 version such as you cannot run the 2004 and 2007 versions on the same machine. There were lots of helpful tips and good code examples.

The author walks you step by step through things such as creating a grammar and prompts. He provides a lot real world advice such as, you will spend more time building the gammar than you will writing the speech application and that not all applications require the effort involved with creating a natural language grammar.

Even though this book is the only one written on this product, it is still well written and an essential resource for anyone working with Speech Server 2007. Timely too since OCS 2007 is coming out any minute.