Customer Reviews

Windows Speech Recognition Programming: With Visual Basic and ActiveX Voice Controls

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

 

 

I would agree with the other review of this title, but a 2-star rating a too high for this book. It lacks anything that is not covered in documentation, and it is a very rare case when documentation is really better than this trash. I had to write a short program doing specific and simple speech recognition task and ordered this book. To say that I was disappointed is to say nothing. I still had to address documentation and found it much better. Moreover, the book is out of date. SAPI 5.1 was flourishing when this title was issued, and the title discusses SAPI 4.0 Besides, it is impossible to get ant actual skills and learn how to develop speech apps from this book.

It is not very understandable why there is no good guide for speech programming using VB, it would be a bestseller.

I bought this book expecting to learn how to incorporate Microsoft Speech functionality into Visual Basic applications. This book fell considerably short of the mark, in my opinion. Several criticisms: (1) Although copyrighted 2004, essentially everything in the book is VB 6 and SAPI 4, even though VB.Net and SAPI 5 came out in 2003. The differences are significant enough to make the examples in the book quite difficult to apply in a current VB.Net environment. (2) The book is very long on description and short on example code. The examples given are short code snippets -- there are no annotated complete program examples, which would have been very helpful. (3) The book has no index, which seems to me inexcusable in an age where a word processor can generate one almost automatically. (4) 150 of the 358 pages are appendices containing things like a 90+ page list of SAPI properties, methods, and events -- all readily available and much more current in the SAPI documentation. (5) Basic instructions for installing the SDK and SAPI and getting Visual Studio to find them are so scattered and lacking in detail as to be essentially useless. (6) The book is poorly edited, with a number of sentences missing words, and material scattered throughout the book that should have been arranged in coherent topics.
This is all unfortunate because I'm not aware of any other book that does any better. I recognize that this is a complex topic, but the MS Speech technology has become quite excellent, and it really isn't that difficult to implement in VB programs once you figure out how -- I hope that the author will give this another try with up to date code and more careful presentation.