Speech Recognition on Office 365 SharePoint with Azure Cognitive Service Speech API

In this post, let us see how speech recognition can be implemented using Microsoft Speech API on SharePoint portals using JavaScript client side libraries/SDKs. This shows how speech to text can be converted on Office 365 SharePoint using Azure Cognitive Services.

In our previous post, we have seen implementing Speech recognition using browser SpeechRecognition objects on SharePoint portals. This post is special for those people who love implementing speech recognition using Microsoft Speech API (Azure Cognitive service speech API).

Note: If you are interested only in the implementation, scroll down to the bottom section. :)

Azure Cognitive Service - Bing Speech API

Microsoft Speech API supports both speech to text and text to speech conversions. In this case, only we are focusing on speech to text conversion. Microsoft Speech API provides two approaches of speech to text conversion. One using the REST API and the other way is using the client libraries. We will be leveraging the client libraries, which provides speech SDK bundles.

Speech Recognition on Office 365 SharePoint

Let us look how the speech recognition can be implemented on Office 365 SharePoint portals. The article contains the introduction to speech recognition service (speech to text conversion), detailed approach for SharePoint, code and snapshots for easier implementation.

Speech Recognition

Speech recognition helps recognizing the real-time audio from the microphone and converts it to the respective text. This kind of interfaces helps in building the voice triggered apps like chat bots, etc.

There are two approaches of implementing speech recognition on SharePoint.

• First using the Speech Recognition interfaces.
• Other way is using the Azure Bing Speech API. It is built on top of WebSockets API. The Speech SDK is available as extensions, which can be leveraged for development.

Let us go with the first approach in this post. We are going to see how the speech recognition interfaces are integrated on to SharePoint applications. In my future articles, I will detail out the integration of Bing Speech API (second approach).