Microsot Speech Server to offer speech-enabled unified messaging

Microsoft has announced that it is expanding its speech technology efforts beyond the call center and interactive voice response markets into the broader enterprise unified messaging market by integrating speech technologies into a future release of Microsoft Exchange Server.

"We're very excited about this partnership with Exchange and believe that offering speech-enabled unified messaging capabilities to the millions of Exchange users will go a long way to help achieve the goal of driving speech mainstream," Bray said.

Launched in May 2005, Microsoft Speech Server (MSS) 2004 R2 is built on .NET technologies and is the first product in its class to allow companies to deploy telephony-only DTMF (dual-tone multifrequency, or touch-tone keypad) applications, speech-enabled telephony applications, and multimodal (mixed speech and visual) applications. MSS 2004 R2 also provides enterprise customers with language support for U.S. Spanish and Canadian French at no additional cost and provides the option of an all-in-one server configuration, which gives those customers greater flexibility when choosing a deployment option.

Part of the Windows Server System, MSS is a Web-based, speech-enabled interactive voice response and multimodal application solutions platform. As a Speech Application Language Tags (SALT)-based solution, Speech Server follows the Web application deployment model, using an ASP.NET-based Web server as the application server.

The two main components of the MSS platform are the Telephony Application Services (TAS) and Speech Engine Services (SES), which include Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-to-Speech (TTS) and prompt manager.