Microsoft SAPI Speech Recognition not working on Windows Server (2008 or 2012)...

[h***@gmail.com]

According to the Microsoft SAPI (5.3 +) documentation, SAPI based applications "should" work on Windows Server 2008 "and newer" OS's.

I created a "Voice2Text" application (from SAPI 5.3), that takes in WAV audio files and produces text transcription files from them. This application works fine on Windows 7 and Windows 8.x.

I tried to run it on Windows Server 2012, but I get error 80004005 while creating the Voice Recognizer Context. I tried Windows Server 2008 (64 bit) just to see if that would work, but I get the same error.

Anyone know how to get SAPI applications to work on Windows Server (preferably 2012)???

[f***@gmail.com]

Does anyone know how to get any help on how to program speech? There are at least 3 methods in Visual Studio, system.speech, microsoft speech, and using SAPI objects (COM?) directly. I can't find any current newsgroups or any way to get help from either Microsoft or the community. Can anyone help? Thanks!

[Klaus Jakobsen]

You want to look at Microsoft's (poorly documented) pages at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/desktop/ee125189(v=vs.85)

Do notice that many interfaces won't be present until you install Desktop Experience and the relevant SDK + runtime.

SAPI takes the SAPI SDK 5.1 (Microsoft never cared to release 5.4). I haven't gotten (free dictation) speech recognition to work with the Speech Server 11.x but it does work with SAPI - both speech recogntion and text to speech (TTS).

The next problem, of course, is multilingual support. AND - because only .wav and .wma are accepted by the speech recognizer, you'll want to find/build a component which enables conversion to/from other various formats. 80% of all searches are done from mobile devices now...so it's not even a (sane) option to leave out...