Book Image

Voice Application Development for Android

Book Image

Voice Application Development for Android

Overview of this book

Speech technology has been around for some time now. However, it has only more recently captured the imagination of the general public with the advent of personal assistants on mobile devices that you can talk to in your own language. The potential of voice apps is huge as a novel and natural way to use mobile devices. Voice Application Development for Android is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a series of clear, step-by-step examples which will help you to build on the basic technologies and create more advanced and more engaging applications. With this book, you will learn how to create useful voice apps that you can deploy on your own Android device in no time at all. This book introduces you to the technologies behind voice application development in a clear and intuitive way. You will learn how to use open source software to develop apps that talk and that recognize your speech. Building on this, you will progress to developing more complex apps that can perform useful tasks, and you will learn how to develop a simple voice-based personal assistant that you can customize to suit your own needs. For more interesting information about the book, visit http://lsi.ugr.es/zoraida/androidspeechbook
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Voice Application Development for Android
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Afterword
Index

NLU with hand-crafted grammars


Designing a grammar involves predicting the different things the user might say and creating rules to cover them. Grammar design is an iterative process of creating an initial grammar, collecting data to test the grammar against actual user input, adding some phrases and removing others, and so on until the coverage of the grammar is as complete as possible. There are various tools to help with the design of grammars. For example, Nuance provides the Nuance Grammar Builder which can be used to test the coverage of a grammar, to check that the test phrases receive the correct semantic interpretation, and to test for over-generation that is, detect any unnecessary or unexpected phrases in the input (http://evolution.voxeo.com/library/grammar/grammar-gsl.pdf).

There are different languages for specifying speech grammars, the most popular are XML and Augmented BNF (ABNF), defined by W3C available at http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-grammar/, Java Script Grammar Format...