SPRAAK is a speech recognition toolkit intended for a diverse population of users:

• SPRAAK is a flexible modular toolkit for speech recognition research
• SPRAAK is a state-of-the art speech recognizer aimed at speech application deployment in niche markets

The SPRAAK Toolkit runs on UNIX/LINUX and Windows (XP and later) platforms, though certain advanced functionalities (distributed computing and resource sharing, mainly relevant for resource development) may not be available on the Windows platforms.

In order to address the different needs, functionalities in SPRAAK may be addressed by a set of different interfaces. Application developers need control over the run-time engine and over the resources that the engine uses. They are fully served by the High Level API. Developing new resources may imply the usage of and minor adaptations to a number of standalone scripts that make use of the lower level API.

Speech researchers will be served by the scripting framework for training and evaluating new systems. Certain types of speech research(e.g. feature extraction) may involve very little programming, while others (e.g. changes to the decoder) are always a major programming effort. Depending on the type of research they may need to dig deeper into the internals for which they will make use of the low level API.

Language models are not included in SPRAAK. Only models for Dutch (Flemish) broadcast news are available though the demo webservices.