Longhorn Speech API
Scott Weinstein points out this Overview of the Longhorn Speech API. It looks to be a nice clean API. As with JSAPI it looks like it is supporting the Speech Recognition Grammar Format as the way to define speech grammars. From what I've heard, the Longhorn speech API will be part of the core OS, so it will be possible to have speech apps work out-of-the-box on Longhorn. Perhaps we'll start to see more intesting speech apps on the desktop because of this.