Using speech recognition and synthesis in Windows 10 to talk to your bot (and have it talk back!)

In my previous posts I have shown how we can use the Microsoft Bot Framework to create smart, intelligent bots that users can interact with using natural language, which is interpreted using the LUIS service (part of Microsoft Cognitive Services).  The bots that we can create using these tools are really powerful but, in most cases users are still typing text when communicating with the bot.  This is perfectly ok in most situations, but it would certainly be fitting for some requirements to actually be able to allow he user to just talk to the bot using speech and have the bot respond in the same way. There are examples of where this can be done on the existing bot channels already, such as users using the Slack mobile app with a voice recognizer function so you don;t have to type your text, but what if we wanted to bake this into our own app?  In this post I am going to provide some basic code that allows a user to converse with a bot using speech in a Windows 10 UWP app.

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