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Philips Speech Extensions guide

Introduction

This guide is written for administrators, support technicians or certified Philips Speech MDC partners who need to set up, maintain or troubleshoot Philips Dictation hardware in remote/virtual environments.

Philips dictation hardware like SpeechMike, SpeechOne, Foot control or PocketMemo can be used in remote/virtual environments. The following diagram shows you a simplified view of such a setup:

usb-client-target.svg

The client_icon.png Client in this diagram is a physical computer where the Philips dictation hardware (e.g. a SpeechMike) is plugged in.

The target_icon.png Target is the virtual/remote system where the software using the Philips dictation hardware is hosted. That software can be Philips software like Philips SpeechExec Enterprise or Philips Device Connector, but it can also be 3rd party software integrating the Philips Hardware SDK or Philips SpeechExec SDK. You may use different terms for what we call target, including host, server or guest. This guide will refer to it as Target.

There are different possibilities to get device functionalities (e.g. button events, audio streams) redirected from the Client to the Target:

  1. Full USB redirection

    Some virtualization platforms provide options for a full redirection of USB devices connected to the client: It appears as if the Philips hardware is connected directly to the target machine. The biggest advantage of this is that no additional Philips drivers need to be installed. However, it might lead to bandwidth issues, since up to 1Mbps is required.

  2. Device splitting

    Some virtualization platforms can be configured to redirect only parts of a connected USB device; e.g. the control interface (button events) of a SpeechMike is redirected on USB level, but the audio interface is handled by native platform specific audio redirection (e.g. VMware RTAV or Citrix HDX).

  3. Philips Speech Extensions

    In this case Philips drivers take care of redirecting device functionalities from the Client to the Target. Redirected functionalities are received on the target side by Philips software or 3rd party software integrating the Philips Hardware SDK or Philips Speech SDK.

This guide only covers the Philips Speech Extensions method, which is recommended, tested and supported by Philips for a variety of environments. You are of course free to use any method that works best for your environment. You may even find documentation about it on the websites of your virtualization platform (Citrix, VMware etc.). However, please be aware that this is not tested or supported by Philips.

Note

Do not install Philips Speech Extensions if you are using the Full USB redirection or if you use the Device splitting method for redirecting the Philips dictation device´s control interface.

Please choose one of the following options:

I want to set up or upgrade Philips Speech Extensions G13

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