14 DAY TRIAL // From the SpeechTEK 2006 conference in New York, Microsoft Corp. announced that the full capabilities of Microsoft Speech Server 2007 will be integrated into Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, extending the company's commitment to unified communications and breaking down today's silos of instant messaging, Internet Protocol telephony, voice response, audioconferencing and videoconferencing. At the show, Microsoft also demonstrated Windows Speech Recognition, which will be available in Windows Vista in eight languages, marking the first time a Microsoft Windows operating system will include speech recognition technologies, so the user can issue commands and dictate text in applications.
Microsoft announced Office Communications Server 2007 earlier this summer as a key component of the company's unified communications road map. Office Communications Server 2007 is a real-time communications hub, enabling people to connect to colleagues and information quickly and easily within familiar applications, devices and networks. The addition of speech capabilities gives developers the opportunity to create new and powerful communications applications or extend existing applications using an integrated set of application programming interfaces (API) and by extending existing applications for Office Communications Server 2007, enabling new revenue streams for their businesses.
"Today, the Speech Server platform is trusted by a number of major Microsoft customers to successfully answer millions of customer calls," said Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president of the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft. "The integration of this proven, reliable technology into Office Communications Server further demonstrates Microsoft's commitment to providing our customers and partners with a truly unified communications solution and platform."
Expanding Scenarios for Unified Communications
Using the new integrated APIs in Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft today demonstrated how a unified communications solution can bridge communication methods such as instant messaging and phone calls through spoken commands and presence capabilities. The demonstrations included the use of an intelligent agent to help a caller locate and communicate with a person based on previously defined preferred methods, such as e-mail or instant messaging. A second demonstration showed an instant messaging conversation taking place with one person speaking and the other typing. The spoken words were translated to text and the typed words were converted to speech, creating a seamless communications experience for both parties. Other solutions demonstrated include presence-aware help desks, integrated contact center solutions, and multimodal applications that can be accessed from a variety of clients.
"The addition of speech technology to Office Communications Server gives us a more extensive set of capabilities on which to build compelling unified communications solutions for our customers," said Ruchi Prasad, vice president of Global Enterprise Marketing for Nortel. "Through our Innovative Communications Alliance, with Microsoft, we have the ability to bring new and unique capabilities to communications applications with Microsoft's speech engine technology integrated with Nortel's own industry-leading IVR and contact center solutions."
Introducing Windows Speech Recognition
Also being shown this week at SpeechTEK are demos of the upcoming release of Windows Speech Recognition, which is designed for users who want to significantly limit the use of mouse and keyboard while maintaining or increasing their overall productivity. The new speech technologies in Windows Vista, which will be available in eight languages, enable users to interact with their computer by voice, and dictate documents and e-mail messages in mainstream applications, fill forms on the Web, and command applications and the operating system. Users are empowered from the beginning through a new interactive training tutorial that will familiarize them with the voice commands, while simultaneously optimizing the system for their voice. Microsoft has expanded the number of Speech Recognition languages it will ship with Windows Vista. In addition to U.S. English, Windows Vista will also support U.K. English, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Japanese, German, French and Spanish.
Continuing Support for Speech Server
With the integration of Speech Server 2007 into Communications Server 2007, current Speech Server customers will be fully supported by Microsoft until 2014, and Speech Server 2004 R2 will remain on the Microsoft price list until the end of 2007. In addition, current Speech Server customers who want to leverage these new capabilities will be able to migrate to Communications Server 2007 when it ships next year.