Microsoft has been researching and developing speech technologies for over a decade. In 1993, the company hired Xuedong (XD) Huang, Fil Alleva, and Mei-Yuh Hwang—three of the four people responsible for the Carnegie Mellon University Sphinx-II speech recognition system, which achieved fame in the speech world in 1992 due to its unprecedented accuracy. Right from the start, with the formation of the Speech API (SAPI) 1.0 team in 1994, Microsoft was driven to create a speech technology that was both accurate and accessible to developers through a powerful API. The team has continued to grow and over the years has released a series of increasingly powerful speech platforms.
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