Brainhat has a SAPI, version 4 speech recognition/ speech generation client. You will find it as bhatclnt.exe in the distribution directory. The client lets you talk to the computer, and the lets the computer talk back to you, using Brainhat as the intelligent agent.

• You need a speech engine: If you have a SAPI compliant speech engine, you can download the client and give it a try. See sapi for the SAPI SDK. Many speech engines, including Dragon Systems and ViaVoice can interface via SAPI.

   

• You may also need the Winsock2 update from Microsoft if you are running Windows95.

SAPI client traffic takes place over port 4144. This is the port that compuserve uses. I chose to make use of it too because it is one of the ports that is opened through a number of corporate firewalls.

The client makes use of a dictation grammar, supporting almost any utterance the speaker might voice. This makes the interface more flexible than one supporting a limited or context free grammar. It also makes it much more susceptible to mis-interpretation of something the user may have said. To try to increase the recognition rate, Brainhat evaluates the first handful of possible interpretations returned by the engine, and it pumps hints to the engine to try to focus the interpretation. However, there is much more to be done. The better your speech engine recognizes your voice, the better.

The mp3 demo on the opening page was created using this client.