"Hello? Computer? Can you hear me?" For the longest time, the answer was simply: No, the computer can't hear you. It could, in theory, read to you, but what came out of the speaker was barely understandable. This has all changed in the last few years. For example, the iPhone has a software named "Siri", which can understand your spoken questions, consult some search engines in the background and respond to you in voice and text. The newest generation of Windows seems to be capable of the same. That's all nice and dandy, but it's very plattform specific. Isn't there a standardized, cross-plattform way to implement it for your (web) application? The answer is, as it always seems to be in recent times, "HTML5". No, this isn't a type or anything. HTML5 got a speech synthesis API (="read me this text") as well as a speech recognition API ("=listen to me and type whatever i say"). See here for the official specs. In this series of articles, i will explain you the basics, so you can use it in your own projects. Be warned, though, the whole speech API stuff is still in its infancy and still a bit browser specific. For simplicity reasons, i'm only developing this against Google Chrome (tested against Version 45/x64 on Ubuntu 14.04/x64). Your mileage may vary. Just explaining the API is a bit boring. Let's make it a mini project. I happen to love the game The Stanley Parable. Never heard of it? That's a shame, it's the perfect game to get your head messed with. It's available on steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/221910/ (no, i don't get any money promoting the game, nor do i work for a game company, i'm just a big fan). The point is: Why not make something similar, a sort of cloney micro-version of The Stanley Parable? Of course, we will have to invent our own story for copyright reasons, and call it, let's say, "The Lisa Paradox". Just three or for rooms with minimal interaction, maybe three or four endings or so, with the game state machine on the server and everything else in the browser. Just enough to test speech synthesis to read the story, speech recognition to control the character and websockets to communicate with the server. We will do this step by step, so i'm splitting the project into multiple articles. I'll release them one by one, if all goes well one part every other day. Next: Part 2