WinRT, speech synthesis, and Windows adoption
Hey, I'm working on trying to port a game I'm writing from Linux to Windows. Most of it should work fine since my engine is cross-platform, but TTS is a bit of a sticking point.
I'm using Rust and wrote my own higher-level TTS library that currently supports Linux and the web via Web Assembly. I added support for Tolk yesterday, and while that's fine for screen reader users, the TTS library is meant to be usable by anyone, so I need a native option. Rust seems to give me a couple ways to achieve this. I can use the winapi crate which uses COM and supports everything back to XP. There's also a winrt crate, a grep through whose source reveals what appears to be support for a speech synthesis API. WinRT speech synthesis examples make a lot more sense to me than does COM, for which there's no common Linux analog.
Since there are lots of Windows developers here, I'm wondering if anyone can explain the differences between the COM-based API, which I assume is SAPI, and this seemingly simpler WinRT API that I assume *isn't* SAPI?
I'm also told that using WinRT locks me to at least Windows 8. For those of you writing/selling Windows games, do you have any sense of how much of your audience uses Windows 7?
My choice of one or the other API isn't necessarily final, since my library allows you to select your TTS backend at runtime, and can conditionally compile in backends. I'll almost certainly want to support the WinRT speech synthesis API at some point for when Rust gains UWP support, then I could potentially compile to XBox targets. My question is which to support now, and I don't know how broad Windows 7 use still is.
Thanks.
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