SpeechLab

SpeechLab is a suite of tools to help with Xbox speech development.

There are three parts to SpeechLab:

1. SpeechLab PC – a PC tool that is your primary interface to working with speech. Use it to:
   • Create, edit, and manage your grammars.
   • Kick off testing on your grammars, both in Explore Mode (ad-hoc testing) and using automation if you already have wav files for the phrases in your grammar.
   • Run data collection so you can collect wav files for the phrases in your grammar
   • Tune and analyze your grammar including getting information on how well your grammars will work and setting confidence values.
2. SpeechLab Console – a console app that lets you test your grammars.
   • Explore Mode – ad hoc test your grammars to get a rough feel for how well it works.
   • Automation – run a full test pass on your grammars if you already have wav files for your phrases. You can use the results of the test pass to pick your confidence values and see which phrases work better than others.
3. Voice Studio – a console app that lets you collect data for your grammars. You can use this data with SpeechLab for test automation.

Included with SpeechLab is a set of “stock grammars”. Stock grammars are a collection of common phrases that we have assembled for use in Xbox One titles. Using stock grammars has several benefits.

• A standard set of actions and phrases that should work well for most titles.
• The phrases are known to work well with the Xbox One speech platform
• The phrases are localized into all supported speech locales.

It is strongly recommended that you use Stock Grammars whenever possible.

Launching SpeechLab

When you open SpeechLab, you will see a splash screen with two options:

• New Project - Use this to create a new project.
• Open Project - Use this to open an existing project.

After selecting one of these, the tool opens the project view.

Remarks

When both the Xbox One XDK and the Xbox 360 XDK are installed on the same the development computer, SpeechLab and xbpg can encounter an error with the description, “Error: An error has occurred due to the Microsoft Speech Runtime,” due to conflicts between the assemblies used by each development kit. To work around this, remove “Microsoft Speech Platform SDK Xbox Extensions (x86) v11.0” by using the Control Panel. Note that removing that component can adversely affect speech development work for Xbox 360 if your project has dependencies on these extensions.

In this section

Project View - SpeechLab
Shows the user interface for the project view in the SpeechLab tool.

SpeechLab Console and Voice Studio
Console applications for testing speech grammars and collecting data for speech grammars.

SpeechLab Stock Grammars
Lists the Stock Grammars available in the SpeechLab tool.