Microsoft Speech Server Moves Into Beta Testing; Partner Program Unveiled

The software giant Wednesday announced the release of the Microsoft Speech Server beta and Beta 3 of the Speech Application Software Development Kit (SASDK). The Redmond, Wash.-based company, however, would not specify an exact ship date or pricing for the speech server.

The SASDK Beta 3 is a set of tools and ASP.Net controls to develop speech-enabled applications that can be accessed from a variety of devices, including PDAs, cell and smart phones, and Tablet PCs. Beta 3 offers support for the Visual Studio.Net 2003 environment and includes Pocket Internet Explorer bits and a speech application wizard.

The suite of speech products and the partner training programs will enable enterprise partners and customers to deploy and manage telephony and multimodal speech applications.

Microsoft Speech Server is considered part of the Windows Server 2003 family of products and exploits the security features of the operating system to protect critical company data.

The server is built on an industry standard known as Speech Application Language Tags (SALT), which extends Web markup languages by adding speech recognition and prompt features to applications.

The core components of the Microsoft Speech Server include a speech-recognition engine, text-to-speech engine, and a prompt engine that plays back prompts from a database so a user hears a human voice. Partners Intel and Intervoice will offer a Telephony Interface Manager platform for Microsoft Speech Server to enable connectivity into enterprise telephony infrastructures and call control services.

One ISV partner, Cadre Technologies, is using the SDK to build speech-enabled applications for its warehousing and logistics software.

"It does speech recognition over telephony so you can write applications that access data using voice," said Ivan Perez-Mendez, vice president of engineering at Cadre, Denver. "You can get the computer talking to you today, but you're still in virgin territory in terms of accessing the database by conversing with a computer. I have an application right now [were] I can use a Pocket PC terminal to direct workers to perform activities so they don't have to look at screen all the time. They can put the Pocket PC on a holster on their belt and talk to the computer like it's a phone, and they're connected to the server."

The Cadre executive said solution providers can use the speech tools and platforms to develop speech-enabled applications--such as ones that allow customers to talk to PCs and handhelds to place orders--for a variety of vertical markets, including health care, manufacturing and warehousing and logistics.

Solution providers, for example, can use the SDK and server to better speech-enable call centers by reducing the number of integrated voice-recognition steps customers have to wade through to get the information they desire, and by creating voice-enabled applications that access enterprise data from a Pocket PC.

For instance, users will be able to utter a few words to access the right department or person, rather than pressing 25 buttons on their telephone. Users will also see new uses of the technology to access corporate data and perform transactions.

"It's like designing a full Web site for a corporation; you have a cottage industry of people that do it," Perez-Mendez said. "It's the same thing here. You have to apply this technology to solve a problem, so there will be a cottage industry that grows around it."

The Microsoft Speech Partner Program, also unveiled on Wednesday, is geared at telephony value-added resellers and distributors, systems integrators, Web developers, ISVs and Microsoft Certified Partners, Microsoft said.

To qualify, partners must complete three training courses: Planning and Voice User Interface Design, Developing Speech Enabled Web applications using the SDK, and Deploying and Administering the Microsoft Speech Server. More than 40 companies, including First Data Voice Services, Enterprise Integration Group, Envox, Ateb and Cadre, have signed up.