Provides a REST API for Windows' text-to-speech engine (SAPI 5).

It is designed to work within Wine, but it should work on Windows too.

If you want to run this on Windows, or if you're doing things manually on Wine, you can download executables from the latest successful GitHub Actions build.

1. Visit https://github.com/depau/SAPISpeechServer/actions/workflows/dotnet.yml
2. Click on the latest successful build
3. Scroll down to the "Artifacts" section and download the SAPISpeechServer file
4. Launch SAPISpeechServer.exe
   • To run it on a different port, run SAPISpeechServer.exe --urls https://localhost:5000 from the command line

It should automatically detect all 32-bit voices. For 64-bit voices you'll need to rebuild it from source.

Images are available for both x86_64 and ARM64.

The images are quite large: ~4.7GB for x86_64 and ~6.7GB for ARM64. This is because they include Wine and all the dependencies.

docker run --rm -it -p 127.0.0.1:5000:5000 ghcr.io/depau/sapispeechserver

The main image also works on ARM64:

docker run --rm -it -p 127.0.0.1:5000:5000 ghcr.io/depau/sapispeechserver

ARM64 images use the FEX-Emu emulator to run Wine. It will be significantly slower than x86_64.

To hopefully improve the performance you can obtain an image for your specific architecture.

Run the get_arm_version.py script to detect your architecture and download the appropriate image.

$ ./scripts/get_arm_version.py
8.3
$ docker run --rm -it -p 127.0.0.1:5000:5000 ghcr.io/depau/sapispeechserver:armv8.3

ARMv8.4 images are currently not available because I lack the hardware to build them. If you have an ARMv8.4 device, use the armv8.3 image.

Navigate to https://localhost:5000/swagger/index.html to see the API documentation.

Use a 32-bit Windows 10 prefix and install speechsdk and dotnet6.

unattended and nocrashdialog are useful for headless operation.

export WINEPREFIX=/path/to/wineprefix
export WINEARCH=win32
winetricks unattended win10 nocrashdialog speechsdk dotnet6 win10

I took extra steps to make sure this builds with .NET Core. Therefore install dotnet-sdk then run:

cd SAPISpeechServer
dotnet publish --runtime win-x86

You can simply run the server inside the wineprefix:

wine bin/Release/net6.0/win-x86/publish/SAPISpeechServer.exe --urls https://localhost:5000

or on Windows:

bin\Release\net6.0\win-x86\publish\SAPISpeechServer.exe --urls https://localhost:5000

You need to use BuildX:

docker buildx build -f Dockerfile-x86_64 -t sapispeechserver .

Replace XXX with the desired ARM version (e.g. 8.3), or use the default (auto) to automatically detect the version based on the CPU features of the host machine.

docker buildx build -f Dockerfile-aarch64 --build-arg ARM_VERSION=XXX -t sapispeechserver .

It's easy to add more voices by creating a downstream image. Here's an example:

FROM ghcr.io/depau/sapispeechserver

COPY Setup.exe /tmp/Setup.exe
COPY Setup.msi /tmp/Setup.msi

RUN source auto_xvfb && \
    # InnoSetup
    wine /tmp/Setup.exe /VERYSILENT /SUPPRESSMSGBOXES && \
    # MSI
    wine msiexec /qn /i /tmp/Setup.msi && \
    # Wait for Wine to shut down
    echo "Waiting for all Windows tasks to complete..." && \
    wineserver -w

docker buildx build --pull -t sapiserver_withvoices .

The procedure is the same for both Intel and ARM64 images; just use a different base image tag if needed.

What's not so easy is figuring out how to make the installer silent. The above examples work respectively with InnoSetup installers and with MSI packages.

For other installers I suggest you use Ghidra to figure out what they're based on, then ask ChatGPT.