Microsoft Speech SDK

The Microsoft Speech SDK 5.1 adds Automation support to the features of the previous version of the Speech SDK. You can now use the Win32 Speech API (SAPI) to develop speech applications with Visual Basic ®, ECMAScript and other Automation languages. The SDK also includes freely distributable text-to-speech (TTS) engines (in U.S. English and Simplified Chinese) and speech recognition (SR) engines (in U.S. English, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese).

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5e86ec97-40a7-453f-b0ee-6583171b4530&displaylang=en


Speech Content in the Windows SDK

 The Speech SDK is no longer shipped separately and is part of the Windows SDK

  the availability of the RTM release of the Windows SDK.  This release - the first RTM one since Vista - contains the following speech-related items:

  • Updated: SAPI 5.3 documentation
  • Updated: System.Speech documentation
  • Updated: Sample source code
    • 8 C++ projects
    • 3 C# projects
    • 2 sample engines - TTS and SR
  • New: Grammar Compiler (GC.EXE) tool now part of the tool binaries included in the SDK

The Windows SDK completely replaces the older SAPI 5.1 SDK and supports development on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008.

Customers can download this SDK as a DVD image (1,330MB ISO file) from this location:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F26B1AA4-741A-433A-9BE5-FA919850BDBF

Or go through a guided setup process where only the components they need are downloaded.  Speech is part of the base install.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E6E1C3DF-A74F-4207-8586-711EBE331CDC

 I'm particularly interested in your feedback regarding the Windows SDK as a whole and in particular getting speech information.