Speech platforms
Since a few different speech technologies were mentioned in the comments, I thought it might be useful to summarize the speech platform technology we currently provide.
Windows
- Windows XP, Tablet and 2003 all include:
- SAPI 5.1: the COM API for use by speech applications, speech synthesis engines, and speech recognition engines.
- Microsoft Sam: a speech synthesis engine.
- Tablet also has speech recognition engines in English, Japanese or Chinese (simplified or traditional).
- The documentation, headers, etc, for building SAPI 5 apps & engines.
- The SAPI 5 binaries, for pre-XP versions of Windows.
- Two more speech synthesis engines: Mike and Mary.
- Speech recognition engines for English, Japanese, and Chinese (simplified).
- The best way to learn more is to install the SDK and take a look at the overview topics & whitepapers.
- We also have SAPI 4.0, which is an older API. I recommend you use SAPI 5, but SAPI 4’s there for those apps that need it.
- A server for running IVR applications (e.g. a customer service app on a 1-800 number).
- The linked web site has a lot of info about this.
- The SDK for building Speech Server apps. Compared to SAPI 5.1 SDK, the SASDK has a higher level of abstraction and is focused on IVR apps. If you want to build an IVR app, SASDK and Speech Server are the products you should use.