System and method for interfacing speech recognition grammars to individual components of a computer program

Abstract

A system for incorporating speech recognition into a computer program, including a number of speech controller modules corresponding to program components within the computer program. Each speech controller module supports a speech recognition grammar having at least one rule, where the speech recognition grammar provides an interface to operations on the corresponding program component. The rules of the speech recognition grammar associate spoken commands with data stored in the corresponding program component. A rule may include a reference to another local rule, or to a rule in a different speech recognition grammar, in which case a “link” to the other rule is formed. In this way, the disclosed system allows rules from the same or different grammars to be combined together, in order to build complex grammars. Each speech controller module operates to dynamically enable one or more rules it contains within a speech recognizer, in response to detecting the occurrence of an associated enabling condition. The speech controller module receives a recognition result from the speech recognizer indicating that the speech recognizer has detected one or more tokens associated with an enabled rule. In response to receipt of the recognition result, a speech controller module operates to invoke a method on data within the corresponding program component, and passes the result on to other speech controller modules that are linked to the recognition rule corresponding to the result.