I have been sitting on this sample for quite a while, but never found the time to get it ready for a post. Before I switch the focus of my blog over to Windows Phone 7 development, I wanted to get this out of the way first :-)
With Silverlight 4, we introduced an exciting new capability for Out-Of-Browser apps: Trusted Applications - one of the key new fatures of Trusted Applications is the ability to integrate with COM Automation interfaces on your Windows PC. What does this mean? This allows you to call into native components on your system that are either provided by the OS or installed by the user or system admin. On MSDN you can find some sample code for the canonical example that highlights the power of this feature: integrating Microsoft Office features into your Silverlight application.
In this blog post, however, I want to show some other cool things you can do with these new APIs on your PC: I want to use the systems handwriting recognizer as well as the systems speech synthesizer within my Silverlight application. Let's do the easy part first and take a look at how we get the speech synthesis done (in the attached sample, this plays back the recognized handwriting):
private void btnSpeak_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
dynamic spVoice = AutomationFactory.CreateObject("SAPI.SpVoice.1");
spVoice.Speak(tbResult.Text);
}
In line 3 we create an instance of the SAPI.SpVoice (SAPI = Microsoft Speach API). Now we can just call the Speak() method (line 4) in order to have the desired text spoken by the machine. Make sure you turn on your speakers.
For the handwriting recognition part, the code looks a little bit more complicated, mostly for two reasons: The COM Automation API for Ink has some oddities & we need to convert the users strokes from pixel space into HiMetric. Here is the full code needed to implement this as extension method on Inkpresenter to have its writing recognized by the system's handwriting recognizer:
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