Greetings Monks,

I've been programming perl for over 5 years, but I'm just starting to move into OOP. The going has been rough. I'm doing this mostly out of necessity, to interface with Win32::OLE objects, but also because I do understand it leads to better code, especially for large projects.

I'm running into a problem trying to get speech recognition working in Win32 with perl. I posted this question before, and only got one response, so I'm going to try asking it again in a more general context. I was really hoping to find a "hello world" perl speech recognition example using Google, but there were none to be found. So, the closest I could come was translating code from simple examples in other languages. Here is a concise python example:

http://www.surguy.net/articles/simple-speech-recognition.py

And a less concise C++ example:

www.generation5.org/aisolutions/sr00.shtml

Okay, the python code doesn't look too bad. Should be no problem to convert to perl.

The code snippet I'm trying to run is very simple:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Win32::OLE;

my $ear = Win32::OLE->new('SAPI.SpSharedRecognizer');
my $context = $ear->CreateRecoContext();
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All I want to do here is create a Recognizer (an ear), and then use that recognizer to create a context. This format is similar in both the Python example, and the C++ example. I've checked the SAPI5.1 docs, and there is definitely a CreateRecoContext method for the SpSharedRecognizer class. When I run this code, I get the following error:

Win32::OLE(0.1403) error 0x80040154: "Class not registered"
    in METHOD/PROPERTYGET "CreateRecoContext" at ear.pl line 6
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What exactly does this error mean? Is there something wrong with the syntax I'm using to call the method? I have the horrible feeling I'm missing something very simple here. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Run environment info:
ActivePerl-5.8.4.810 running on Windows XP with SP1 SAPI5.1 is installed, and I can call the text-to-speech API in perl with no problem.

One other question. When I posted this request before, Jouke Visser was kind enough to point me to his Win32::SAPI5 module. However, I don't understand the need for this module. Shouldn't I be able to access all the methods defined in Win32::SAPI5 using Win32::OLE directly?

When I get this working, I'll add it to the Win32::OLE CPAN-Specific tutorials, in case anyone else out there wants to use speech recognition in their perl scripts.

Thanks,
TROGDOR