Voice Help provides spoken Help for speech commands active in the application. Voice Help includes short voice Help, that provides only a list of the active speech commands using prerecorded speech, and long voice Help, that provides task-based information for each active speech command using the text-to-speech (TTS) engine. A user can stop short and long voice Help by pressing any key on the faceplate or the PTT key.
A user accesses short voice Help by saying What can I say? An Auto PC lists active speech commands by playing waveform (WAV) files that you provide. These files contain a recording of each speech command that is used in your application. These recordings are called prerecorded speech templates. For example, if an application has the speech commands Hot, Warm, and Cool, you could record an 11-kHz, 8-bit mono WAV file for each of these words to create a prerecorded speech template. You could then install the WAV files with your application to provide short voice Help.
For example, an Auto PC reads the following in prerecorded speech for short voice Help for Radio.exe, an AM/FM radio application.
“The speech commands are AM, Preset, Read, Next, Previous, <plus global speech commands>.”
Long voice Help is accessed when the user says Help. You provide strings for each speech command with the text that you want an Auto PC to read to the user. When a user says Help, Windows CE for the Auto PC reads the strings for the speech commands active in the application. The long voice Help strings are read through the TTS engine. They can include code to assist the TTS engine in timing and pronunciation of the string. If you do not provide a string for long voice Help, it is disabled for that speech command.
When writing the strings for long voice Help, limit information to quick, task-based information on the available speech commands. The following text is read in TTS for long voice Help for Radio.exe:
“To change the radio band, say AM or FM. To seek for a radio station, say Next or Previous. To go to a radio preset, say Preset, and then say the number or voice tag. To read back the selected audio setting, say Read.”
The application-specific long voice help is followed by the long voice Help for global commands.