I need to achieve the following, in order to avoid having to develop a very costly web app. Please advise if it is feasible to use Skype (or another PDA friendly VOIP) to call a computer that is running an MS Access form. The MS Access form would be integrated with speech-recognition and text-to-speech, to communicate back and forth via Skype VOIP. The remote Skype user would use voice commands to run MS Access macros. Some of these macros would use text-to-speech to prompt the user to verbally input data into the MS Access form fields. I have already tested the apps "Windows 7’s Speech Recognition" and "Dragon Naturally Speaking", but they don’t work with VOIP, because they require the speech to be inputted from a microphone and can not work if the speech is inputted from the speaker, so the speech-recognition needs to be running on the computer that is running the MS Access app and should not be running on the user’s side. I am hoping that such a setup can be achieved using another app or with some custom programming. Please outline the proper procedure and/or provide insight.
Thank you very much in advance, Nathaniel
Here are some points just to clarify a few things from your question.
Microsoft Speech Recognition is not limited to microphone input. You can capture audio to a wav file and then process the captured audio. See SpeechRecognitionEngine.SetInputToWaveFile - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.speech.recognition.speechrecognitionengine.setinputtowavefile.aspx. Note that this requires the use of an inproc recognizer (SpeechRecognitionEngine) instead of the shared recognizer (SpeechRecognizer). This means you must have your own speech recognition application, this method does not use the Windows desktop speech recognition to control applications.
Many IVR systems accept VOIP input using standards like SIP. The Microsoft Speech Server product that got consumed by Microsoft Lync supports VOIP input. See SIP Peers - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/lync/bb812717(v=office.12).aspx. However, I believe Skype does not use VOIP standards like SIP without extra costs - http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/business/skype-connect/
When you are trying to voice enable your access application, are you using standard voice control for access like http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/speech-recognition-commands-in-access-HA001034591.aspx ?