Eclipse Voice Tools Project: step-by-Step Introduction to acquiring and extending speech development tools

Eclipse Voice Tools Project is a new project that tries to unite companies and individuals in the voice industry to create a common set of standard, open source voice development tools. But how do you extend or improve the tools of your project? This article explains how to set up and customize the Voice Tools Project environment, and also describes the steps involved in adding new features.

Eclipse is an incredibly common development platform that has been widely used in the computer industry. In addition to its world-class Java™ development environment, Eclipse Foundation hosts a number of projects designed to create various tool groups-from C to COBOL to the BPEL language. One of its newest projects, Eclipse Web Tools project, has created a set of open source web development tools. With mature XML, SQL, and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (EE) tools, Web Tools Project naturally becomes the de facto web development environment.

Voice Tools Project (VTP) is developed using Web Tools project, in a way that extends its web development tool library to speech recognition. In this way, Voice tools Project can provide many out-of-the-box WEB development experiences for voice development, allowing users to develop their voice applications using the same tools as developing visual applications. For a company that uses Voice tools Project as its tool library, this means that without extra effort, you can provide all the tasks that users want to achieve with the modern WEB-oriented integrated development environment (IDE).

But how can Voice Tools Project work for your particular requirements? I'll explain the Voice Tools Project source code and how to add your own "voice" to the source code-whether it's for commercial or open code changes, the basic concepts are the same.

Set up

To set up the best development environment that fits your needs, it is important to understand what the prerequisites are. Because Voice Tools project relies on Web Tools project (which relies on the Eclipse SDK), several appropriate versions of the package must be installed.

First enter the Voice Tools Project home page to find the latest compatible version of WEB Tools project. At the time of writing this article, the latest compatible version is 0.7.

Visit the Web Tools project download page to get the appropriate version of Web Tools project. You need to get the SDK ZIP file version and meet the prerequisites listed in Requirements. When I wrote this article, the requirements for Web Tools Project were Eclipse 3.1, EMF 2.1, GEF 3.1, and Java EMF Model Runtime 1.1.

Finally, if you do not have a single installation, you will need to install a Java Runtime environment (JRE) version.

Extract Eclipse into a library directory, such as C:\eclipse. Other required technical files are also extracted to the same path so that they are located in the appropriate location below the plugins\ and features\ subdirectories.

To test your configuration, you should start Eclipse and try to create a new Web project by selecting File > New > Other ... > Web > Dynamic Web Projects. If the wizard is available and executed correctly, your installation is correct.

Figure 1. Starting the wizard is a simple test to check the installation

Now that you're ready and running, let's start doing something with it.