I wrote an article titled “Speech Recognition with .NET Desktop Applications” in the December 2014 issue of Microsoft’s MSDN Magazine. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn857362.aspx. In the article, I explain how to add voice commands to Windows desktop applications (WinForm apps, WPF apps, console shell apps).

When I write, I usually present information that is new and isn’t available anywhere else. This article is an exception — all the information is available in documentation. But, in my opinion, the existing documentation was just awful, so I presented two complete end-to-end demo programs, and included detailed information about how to install the necessary libraries, and discussed pros and cons of various implementation alternatives.

By awful existing documentation, I mean that there is a huge amount of information on speech recognition, but it is disorganized, and just not useful from a software developer’s point of view.

As I note in the article, “Mastering the technology itself isn’t too difficult once you get over the initial installation and learning hurdles. The real issue with speech recognition and synthesis is determining when they’re useful.”