SAPI4 & SAPI5  Speech Engines

• Microsoft's Speech page - has links to download SAPI 5.1 and SAPI 4.0a SDKs (which include both SR and TTS engines from Microsoft). The SAPI 5.0 SDK also works but it appears to be no longer available.
• L&H TTS engines from the Microsoft Agent Download Page - download the Lernout & Hauspie TruVoice American English TTS engine (1MB) and ten Lernout & Hauspie TTS3000 TTS engines, each one over 2MB (UK English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese). This page also has links to other SAPI4-compliant speech engines.
• IBM's ViaVoice runtimes - either from an installation of ViaVoice (Version 9 has been tested with this implementation) or with the ViaVoice SDK. SR and TTS engines.
• Dragon NaturallySpeaking (SR) - large range of languages available. NaturallySpeaking Essentials is the cheapest option for getting the Dragon SR engine (the more expensive versions seem to offer more features on top of the common SR engine). Note that you will need to ensure that the Dragon NaturallySpeaking application is NOT running in order to be able to use the SR engine with the JSAPI.
• Infovox 330 TTS engine - a good quality TTS engine but with some bugs in the SAPI4 interface that cause phrases to be ended prematurely and word events to be reported incorrectly. The word-event bug can be got around for now by calling CGEngineProperties.useFixForInfovox330(true).
• AT&T NaturalVoices TTS engines - very good quality but hard to purchase directly. Nextup.com will sell the two default voices for $25 as an upgrade to one of their products, or separately for $35 here. These engines have not been tested by Cloudgarden, but users have reported that they work well.
• Loquendo TTS engines - if you contact Loquendo they can send you an evaluation copy of their SAPI5 TTS engines, and you can later purchase licenses from them for their engines. The "Susan" voice has been tested with the JSAPI - it sounds lifelike and works fairly well.
• Philips Speech SDK 2.0 (SR) - 90 day trial. (Note: Philips Speech SDK version 3.0 is not SAPI4 or SAPI5 compatible, so will not work with Cloudgarden's JSAPI). The Philips engine and the ViaVoice both use a srobj.dll file, so if both are installed at the same time one of the Philips or IBM engines will not appear in the list (and you will also get some errors). So install one or the other, but not both (you can also disable the ViaVoice engines by renaming the "Program Files/ViaVoice" folder temporarily, which is quicker than uninstalling it if you want to try the Philips engine). Also,
1) Installing languages using PSPAPI/Administration.exe might not make
them accessible to JSAPI.
2) You can use the SAPI/DialogTest.exe program to first uninstall any
existing languages installed using PSPAPI/Administration.exe
3) Then use SAPI/DialogTest.exe to install a language and then a dictation
context (using the ISRInstall->GeneralDlg menu option)
4) You can create a new speaker using SAPI/DialogTest.exe or JSAPI.