Millions of PC users may not know it, but they can ignore the keyboard and mouse when they want to create and format e-mails and Microsoft Word documents, open and close files in Excel, or create PowerPoint presentations. And they can also ignore their display screens and have the numbers and text read back to them as they enter data into an Excel spreadsheet.
That’s because the software they’re using – Microsoft Office XP – understands voice commands and can convey information by speaking. Office XP’s ability to understand and use spoken language is based on a Microsoft technology called the Speech Application Programming Interface (SAPI) that’s also being used by a growing array of independent software developers to speech-enable their own applications. Microsoft this week released SAPI version 5.1, which vastly simplifies application developers’ work to enable their applications to speak and to understand the speech directed to them.
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