The Speech API is the unified version of the speech-to-text and text-to-speech services, and is the successor of the Bing Speech API. In addition to recognizer and synthesizer, speech translation provides real-time, multi-language translation capabilities.
Azure Speech Services provides a very competent alternative to the native speech recognition features of mobile platforms. Azure Speech Services is a proven technology that is also used for Cortana and supports multiple languages. Speech to text uses the universal language model that was trained by Microsoft-owned data, but it can also be trained further for custom acoustics, language, and pronunciation.
Speech services are available through various SDKs and the RESTful API. Unfortunately, the Xamarin SDK is currently not available (only native versions are available for Java and Objective-C). Nevertheless, .NET Core SDK is ready to use and can be used with UWP applications.
Some of the key features of this transcription...