Techniques and systems to provide speech recognition services over a network using a standard interface are described. In an embodiment, a technique includes accepting a speech recognition request that includes at least audio input, via an application program interface (API). The speech recognition request may also include additional parameters. The technique further includes performing speech recognition on the audio according to the request and any specified parameters; and returning a speech recognition result as a hypertext protocol (HTTP) response. Other embodiments are described and claimed.