Microsoft Resolves Speech Recognition Outage (Sort of)

WindowsMedia continuous speech recognition stops working in apps briefly

No, it is not your imagination, configuration, or code, if speech recognition was working one day and not the next.

Many of you may or may not have noticed, been affected, or exposed to the outage since the outage impact is only for WindowsMedia continuous speech recognition (dictation constraint). In SpeechKit parlance, applications that use a dictation vocabulary with the WindowsMedia speech API are affected. Command and grammar speech recognition are not affected.

There are no errors or exceptions. Sound detection and utterance detection events fire normally. The application simply does not receive any speech recognition results. We notified Microsoft that the outage was detected on April 7, 2023. We received notification and confirmed that service was restored on April 18, 2023.

WindowsMedia speech recognition and speech synthesis is part of Windows and available in most languages. It is configured under Settings->Time & Language. Review Knowledge Base article H072213 for details about developing apps with WindowsMedia.

Now for the sort of part. Even though service is restored for many, Microsoft is still working on resolving the root cause. Some apps may still have outages depending on platform environment. Please let us know if you are impacted so we can get critical information to Microsoft for rapid resolution.

Let us know if you would like to know more, if you need assistance, or have questions. We can provide turnkey apps if you no longer want to build them yourself.