为什么PHP COM对象没有返回正确的结果？

Question

I'm trying to access Windows SAPI5 or Text to speech (TTS) using PHP. The standard approach is to create a COM object for "SAPI.SpVoice", then get the installed voices.

Sample PHP code:

<?php

$obj = new COM('SAPI.SpVoice');
$voices = $obj->GetVoices;
$count = $voices->Count;

print $count; #prints "1"

Unfortunately the output returned from PHP's COM object is incorrect because I have 5 voices installed on my system, but PHP only returns 1.

So, just to check if this a PHP specific issue, I wrote the same code in Perl 5.8 (strawberry).

Sample Perl code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Win32::OLE;

my $obj = Win32::OLE->new('SAPI.SpVoice');
my $voices = $obj->GetVoices;
my $count = $voices->Count;

print $count; #print "5" which is correct.

So the perl code correctly returns that I have 5 TTS voices on my system, but PHP returns only 1?

Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong? What could be the possible cause of this?

PS I've tried this on two different computers and results are the same.

Answer 1

I figured this after some trial error. It looks like if I use the 32-bit version of PHP then I get the correct results (5 voices). But since I had installed the 64-bit version by default I only get 1 voice.

I think the TTS voices are mostly 32 bit (like those installed on my system) and so when running with a 64-bit php.exe it only returns 64-bit voices. With 32 php.exe it returns all voices.

Posting this as answer in case someone faces a similar issue in future.