Speech Application Programming Interface

The Speech Application Programming Interface or SAPI is an API developed by Microsoft to allow the use of speech recognition and speech synthesis within Windows applications. To date, a number of versions of the API have been released, which have shipped either as part of a Speech SDK, or as part of the Windows OS itself. Applications that use SAPI include Microsoft Office, Microsoft Agent and Microsoft Speech Server.

In general all versions of the API have been designed such that a software developer can write an application to perform speech recognition and synthesis by using a standard set of interfaces, accessible from a variety of programming languages. In addition, it is possible for a 3rd-party company to produce their own Speech Recognition and Text-To-Speech engines or adapt existing engines to work with SAPI. In principle, as long as these engines conform to the defined interfaces they can be used instead of the Microsoft-supplied engines.

In general the Speech API is a freely redistributable component which can be shipped with any Windows application that wishes to use speech technology. Many versions (although not all) of the speech recognition and synthesis engines are also freely redistributable.

There have been two main 'families' of the Microsoft Speech API. SAPI versions 1 through 4 are all similar to each other, with extra features in each newer version. SAPI 5 however was a completely new interface, released in 2000. Since then several sub-versions of this API have been released.

The Speech API can be viewed as an interface or piece of middleware which sits between applications and speech engines (recognition and synthesis). In SAPI versions 1 to 4, applications could directly communicate with engines. The API included an abstract interface definition which applications and engines conformed to. Applications could also use simplified higher-level objects rather than directly call methods on the engines.

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