System.Speech and Voices

Question

is it possible to create portable applications from Scansoft voices .exe files ? (www.portableapps.com).

and then be able to access the voices programmatically through System.Speech namespace in .NET 3.5 ?

I want to do that so I don't have to take a dedicated server just to install my text-to-speech web app.

Help !

Answer 1

This should be possible. But there might be licensing restrictions with your Scansoft voice. What kind of licensing do you have?

Answer 2

I don't know that much about Portable Apps, but I do know that SAPI (the native code underneath System.Speech.SpeechSynthesizer) uses the HKLM node in the registry to look up voices. So I don't think it's possible unless Portable Apps can install some sort of shim into the registry to redirect the registry calls that SAPI will make.

Then, of course, you do have the licensing issues.