John,

I understand your problem, I havn't used the control tags before but I did have a play with your sample, no luck i'm afraid.
The problem is that text held in quotes, according to vfp is text not a command, although from what i have read about SAPI, the speech engine should interprete it diffrently. I think this is a problem with VFP working diffrently from VB and C++ for which the API was written.
I have been able to change all parementers except for pitch. I will continue to play with this, I have a C expert joining me in a couple of days, I am going to give him the task of seeing if we cant call the API that way. I will let you know the outcome.