Book excerpt: A project-based book that teaches beginning Python programmers how to build working, useful, and fun voice-controlled applications. This fun, hands-on book will take your basic Python skills to the next level as you build voice-controlled apps to use in your daily life. Starting with a Python refresher and an introduction to speech-recognition/text-to-speech functionalities, you’ll soon ease into more advanced topics, like making your own modules and building working voice-controlled apps. Each chapter scaffolds multiple projects that allow you to see real results from your code at a manageable pace, while end-of-chapter exercises strengthen your understanding of new concepts. You’ll design interactive games, like Connect Four and Tic-Tac-Toe, and create intelligent computer opponents that talk and take commands; you’ll make a real-time language translator, and create voice-activated financial-market apps that track the stocks or cryptocurrencies you are interested in. Finally, you’ll load all of these features into the ultimate virtual personal assistant – a conversational VPA that tells jokes, reads the news, and gives you hands-free control of your email, browser, music player, desktop files, and more. Along the way, you’ll learn how to: ● Build Python modules, implement animations, and integrate live data into an app ● Use web-scraping skills for voice-controlling podcasts, videos, and web searches ● Fine-tune the speech recognition to accept a variety of input ● Associate regular tasks like opening files and accessing the web with speech commands ● Integrate functionality from other programs into a single VPA with computational knowledge engines to answer almost any question Packed with cross-platform code examples to download, practice activities and exercises, and explainer images, you’ll quickly become proficient in Python coding in general and speech recognition/text to speech in particular.