Speech Enable Your computer system The very first thing you must do is ensure that the speech extensions are installed in your operating system. These are the binaries that add the SAPI speech capabilities to your OS. As a speech application developer you add these binaries by downloading and installing the SAPI SDK. The SDK comes in two flavors. You can get just the SDK by it self or the SDK with all the freely redistributable speech engine's. Download the (8+ mb) or the (40+ mb).
Discover how Speech enables the integration of speech processing capabilities into any app or service. Convert spoken language into text or produce natural sounding speech from text using standard (or customizable) voice fonts. Try any service freeāand quickly build speech-enabled apps and services with the following capabilities.
The suite also includes all of the Microsoft Speech engines. Installing either version of the SDK will also install the SAPI OS extensions. Note that when you get round to distributing your speech application you will probably also want to make the re-distributable file (SAPI 4. Runtime support) available to your users.
This file also comes with the SDK. As alternative to downloading the whole suite you can also go to the Microsoft Agent component page and download the various SAPI 4 parts from there. At a minimum you should download the SAPI 4 runtime support , at least one text-to-speech engine, and one Speech Recognition engine.
Note that you will find a number of foreign language text-to-speech engines here including Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Step 2 Download SAPI compliant engines.
If you downloaded and installed the SDK suite in step 1 then you can skip this step because it included a number of speech engines. Otherwise, you need to get SAPI compliant speech engines for text-to-speech and speech recognition. Microsoft makes their speech engines (Continuous Dictation, Command and Control and Text-to-Speech available for at no cost.
You can even redistribute the engines with your DTalk application. Check out the for further details.
Digalo is a Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine that will read all your computer texts in any of 7 languages: French, German, Spanish, Brazilian, Russian, British English, and US English- with the most natural sounding voices yet. Digalo empowers all speaking applications supporting SAPI or MS Agent.
Another set of free Text-to-Speech engines is available on the MS Agent web site at. These are legacy engines licensed to Microsoft by Lenout & Hauspie (L&H). They are not supported by either company. IBM is also currently making its SR engine available for free download at. From time to time other vendors will make versions of their engines available for download.
We will let you know as these become available. Download DTalk Finally, download the DTalk component set demo. This demo is a completely functional version of DTalk with the only limitation being that applications created with the component set only work when Delphi is also running. DTalk1 DTalk2 DTalk3 Delphi 2 na na Delphi 3 na na Delphi 4 na na Delphi 5 na na Delphi 6 na na Delphi 7 na na CBuilder 1 na na na CBuilder 3 na na CBuilder 4 na na CBuilder 5 na na Step 4. Install everything For best results install your collection of downloads in the following order.
First install the SAPI SDK. Next install the engines.
(If you installed the SAPI SDK 4.0 suite then the engines are already installed. Finally install the DTalk component set into Delphi or CBuilder and run the demo programs. If you find that any of the links on this page are broken then please let us know by sending us an E-Mail message. Last updated October 20, 2005.