Text to Speech Library (Windows only)

[SMcNeill]

Steve, now you need to do Speech to Text (which PowerShell does support).

I was playing around with this concept a little bit this evening.  From what I can tell, it's a worthless endeavor.  Try this little powershell snippet out for example (save as something like "Test.ps1").

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add-type -assemblyname system.speech

$sp = [System.Speech.Recognition.SpeechRecognitionEngine]::new()
$sp.LoadGrammar([System.Speech.Recognition.DictationGrammar]::new())
$sp.SetInputToDefaultAudioDevice()
$result = $sp.Recognize()

$result

Now, powershell didn't like me just running the file as it exists, so I had to bypass a few security settings with:

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powershell -executionpolicy ByPass -File .\Test.ps1

Run it, and you get a blank prompt which basically appears to do nothing.  (It's waiting a few seconds for you to talk to it...)  Say something, and watch the hilarity ensue as it tries to decipher what you just said.

"Do you understand me at all?":

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Audio                : System.Speech.Recognition.RecognizedAudio
Alternates          : {0, 0, 0, 0...}
Text                : Then we now understand me at all
Confidence          : 0.08942806
Words                : {System.Speech.Recognition.RecognizedWordUnit, System.Speech.Recognition.RecognizedWordUnit,
                      System.Speech.Recognition.RecognizedWordUnit, System.Speech.Recognition.RecognizedWordUnit...}
Semantics            : {}
Homophones          : {0, 0, 0, 0...}
Grammar              : System.Speech.Recognition.DictationGrammar
ReplacementWordUnits : {System.Speech.Recognition.ReplacementText}
HomophoneGroupId    : 0

About 9% confidence that "Then we now understand me at all" is what I said...

And so, I tested it multiple times with a simple "HELLO WORLD" speech...  My results were:

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Text                : A year later in
Text                : Al Oleg
Text                : The Moraga
Text                : The elena's
Text                : That illusion were in

5 tries, and as you can see, 5 nonsensical translations of what I said.

Now, is this an issue of a poor microphone?  Poor speech training on my PC?

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I don't know the problem seems to be that it just doesn't understand me because these last few lines here I dictated flawlessly into Microsoft Word with my same setup on my PC

As it looks to me, Powershell speech-to-text isn't something worth me wasting my time exploring, since it never seems to generate more than an 8% certainty on anything I say.