Thom Robbins

Thom Robbins


Thom Robbins a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft in New England. He is a frequent speaker at a variety of events including Dev Days and VS Live. Thom is also a regular contributor to various magazines including .Net Magazine and XML Web Service Journal. He spends his time working with developers in New England. When he’s not writing code he can be found with his wife, Denise, at their home in New Hampshire. You can reach Thom at trobbins@microsoft.com or through his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/trobbins.

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Articles Authored

  • Building Speech-Enabled Applications with ASP.NET

    Last updated: Friday, October 28, 2022

    Published in: CODE Magazine: 2005 - November/December

    While sleepless the other night, I was channel surfing and ran across a rerun of the 1968 science fiction classic “2001: A Space Odyssey.”If you haven’t seen this movie, it’s definitely a must see. HAL, one of the main characters of the movie, is a slightly psychotic speech-enabled super computer. HAL is responsible for steering the Discovery spacecraft on its ill-fated Jupiter mission. As I watched the movie I was completely amazed at HAL’s abilities. HAL handled press interviews, played a wicked game of chess, has varied opinions on art, controls life support, and can read lips. Not to completely destroy the movie if you haven’t seen it, but I have to say that I am grateful that most of the movie’s predictions aren’t true. However, like the HAL of 1968, speech-enabled applications have become a core requirement for both corporate and commercial developers. In this article, I’ll help you explore the Microsoft Speech Platform that comprises the Speech Application Software Development Kit (SASDK) and Microsoft Speech Server 2004. I’ll also show you how you can use these technologies with Visual Studio 2003 to both build and deploy speech-enabled applications.