Microsoft Corp. today disclosed the road map and first set of features of its upcoming release of Microsoft Speech Server 2007. Beginning in May, beta testers will have the opportunity to preview and provide feedback on Speech Server 2007, which is planned for release in late 2006. Speech Server 2007 is Microsoft's next-generation speech and telephony platform to help contact centers and businesses meet the challenge of reducing costs while improving automated customer service over the telephone.

Speech Server 2007 will provide full support for Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) and Voice Extensible Markup Language , which will enable customers to choose the development standard that will work best in their environment. In addition, Speech Server 2007 can easily plug into existing telephony infrastructures to deliver more cost-effective and integrated customer-service operations. Contact center and business managers will also have access to new monitoring tools that can identify performance issues and opportunities to help ensure that the system is efficiently and accurately addressing caller inquiries.

"Enterprise purchasing criteria is changing. More businesses today, than ever before, are making telephony and IT-based decisions regarding IVR platform technology to secure investments," said Daniel Hong, senior voice business analyst at Datamonitor plc. "Microsoft's support for both VoiceXML and SALT, in addition to key integrations with its tooling assets, provides Speech Server customers with a greater level of flexibility and investment protection across multiple infrastructures and applications. This enables organizations to choose and build an IVR solution that can seamlessly fit into their existing environments."

"With Speech Server 2007, Microsoft will provide a flexible platform that is a cost-effective, long-term investment with the ability to integrate with current telephony infrastructures," said Rich Bray, general manager of the Speech Server group at Microsoft. "In addition, with the new development capabilities we're providing, companies that previously had to choose between the best long-term platform and support for VoiceXML can now have both with Speech Server 2007."

Open Development and Deployment Choice

Broadening voice response application development options for companies, Speech Server 2007 includes full support for SALT and VoiceXML. With the newly included VoiceXML support, customers will be able to write World Wide Web Consortium's VoiceXML 2.1-compliant applications within Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and deploy those applications, or existing VoiceXML 2.1-compliant applications, on Speech Server 2007. Microsoft has also joined the VoiceXML Forum (http://www.voicexml.org/ ) at the Promoter level.

Speech Server 2007 also introduces a powerful Microsoft .NET Framework- based application programming interface (API) for low-level access to core Speech Server functionalities. Companies can build applications on the Speech Server API using widely known programming languages such as JavaScript and C#, reducing time and development cost.

Native VoIP Support

Leveraging Microsoft's investments in Internet protocol (IP) telephony, Speech Server 2007 will include native support for voice over IP (VoIP), providing companies with a powerful platform that can grow with changing business and technology needs. The platform will natively support Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) as core communications protocols for out-of-the-box support for IP telephony and interoperability with leading VoIP gateways.

Existing telephony infrastructure investments can also be enhanced with Speech Server 2007's support for traditional time division multiplexing (TDM) or hybrid IP/TDM environments.

Deep Caller Behavior Insight

With Speech Server 2007, Microsoft introduces the Speech Server Analytics Studio and Speech Server Business Intelligence Tools to provide companies with customizable, detailed usage reports. From these reports, developers, IT professionals and business managers will be able to rapidly assess opportunities and challenges, driving needed changes in the caller experience.

The Speech Server Analytics Studio will provide a variety of predefined reports containing details of common scenarios. The reports provide the opportunity to drill down from a high-level results analysis to actual call events and audio files. Speech Server Analytics Studio is built on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, enabling developers to write their own custom and ad-hoc reports to transform valuable enterprise data into shared information for insightful, timely decisions. Speech Server Business Intelligence Tools provide managers with a long-term view of caller behavior by creating blocks of large volumes of caller data that can be reviewed using online analytical processing (OLAP). Microsoft Speech Server Adoption

Over the past two years, Speech Server 2004 has been embraced by more than 100 customers in the United States and Canada. More than 40,000 telephony ports of capacity have been licensed, and Speech Server customers are successfully answering more than 10 million calls per month on the platform.