Enable speech in Web Chat

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APPLIES TO: SDK v3

You can enable a voice interface in the Web Chat control. Users interact with the voice interface by using the microphone in the Web Chat control.

Web chat speech sample

If the user types instead of speaking a response, Web Chat turns off the speech functionality and the bot gives only a textual response instead of speaking out loud. To re-enable the spoken response, the user can use the microphone to respond to the bot the next time. If the microphone is accepting input, it appears dark or filled-in. If it's grayed out, the user clicks on it to enable it.

Prerequisites

Before you run the sample, you need to have a Direct Line secret or token for the bot that you want to run using the Web Chat control.

Customizing Web Chat for speech

To enable the speech functionality in Web Chat, you need to customize the JavaScript code that invokes the Web Chat control. You can try out voice-enabled Web Chat locally using the following steps.

  1. Download the sample index.html.

  2. Edit the code in index.html according to the type of speech support you want to add. The types of speech implementations are described in Enable speech services.

  3. Start a web server. One way to do so is to use npm http-server at a Node.js command prompt.

    • To install http-server globally so it can be run from the command line, run this command:

      npm install http-server -g

    • To start a web server using port 8000, from the directory that contains index.html, run this command:

      http-server -p 8000

  4. Aim your browser at https://localhost:8000/samples?parameters. For example, https://localhost:8000/samples?s=YOURDIRECTLINESECRET invokes the bot using a Direct Line secret. The parameters that can be set in the query string are described in the following table:

    Parameter Description
    s Direct Line secret. See Connect a bot to Direct Line for information on getting a Direct Line secret.
    t Direct Line token. See Generate a Direct Line token for info on how to generate this token.
    domain Optional. The URL of an alternate Direct Line endpoint.
    webSocket Optional. Set to 'true' to use WebSocket to receive messages. Default is false.
    userid Optional. The ID of the bot user.
    username Optional. The user name of the bot's user.
    botid Optional. ID of the bot.
    botname Optional. Name of the bot.

Enable speech services

The customization allows you to add speech functionality in any of the following ways:

  • Browser-provided speech - Use speech functionality built into the web browser. At this time, this functionality is only available on the Chrome browser.
  • Create a custom speech service - You can create your own custom speech recognition and voice synthesis components.

Browser-provided speech

The following code instantiates speech recognizer and speech synthesis components that come with the browser. This method of adding speech is not supported by all browsers.

Note

Google Chrome supports the browser speech recognizer. However, Chrome may block the microphone in the following cases:

  • If the URL of the page that contains Web Chat begins with http:// instead of https://.
  • If the URL is a local file using the file:// protocol instead of https://localhost:8000.
const speechOptions = {
     speechRecognizer: new BotChat.Speech.BrowserSpeechRecognizer(),
     speechSynthesizer: new BotChat.Speech.BrowserSpeechSynthesizer()
};

Custom Speech service

You can also provide your own custom speech recognition that implements ISpeechRecognizer or speech synthesis that implements ISpeechSynthesis.

const speechOptions = {
    speechRecognizer: new YourOwnSpeechRecognizer(),
    speechSynthesizer: new YourOwnSpeechSynthesizer()
  };

Pass the speech options to Web Chat

The following code passes the speech options to the Web Chat control:

BotChat.App({
    bot: bot,
    locale: params['locale'],
    resize: 'detect',
    // sendTyping: true,    // defaults to false. set to true to send 'typing' activities to bot (and other users) when user is typing
    speechOptions: speechOptions,
    user: user,
    directLine: {
      domain: params['domain'],
      secret: params['s'],
      token: params['t'],
      webSocket: params['webSocket'] && params['webSocket'] === 'true' // defaults to true
    }
  }, document.getElementById('BotChatGoesHere'));

Next steps

Now that you can enable voice interaction with Web Chat, learn how your bot constructs spoken messages and adjusts the state of the microphone:

Additional resources