Speech Server 2007 to Support VoIP Natively

Published: April 12, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft was heard last week talking up the forthcoming release of Speech Server 2007, the next release of its interactive voice response (IVR) platform due out by the end of 2006. Programming improvements, new analytical capabilities, and native voice over IP (VoIP) support will headline the debut.

Support for VoIP technologies will allow Speech Server 2007 users to more easily use Internet-based phones, as opposed to more expensive hard-wired phones. Support for several related standards, including VoIP, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP), paves the way for this product's support of IP telephony and interoperability with leading VoIP gateways, Microsoft says. It can also be used in traditional time division multiplexing (TDM) or a hybrid IP/TDM environment.

Speech Server 2007 will include support for two new standards: Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) and Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML). The company says support for these standards will boost interoperability with other IVR systems. Microsoft will also publish a low-level API for Speech Server 2007 that allows developers to develop speech-enabled applications using the JavaScript and C# programming languages.

In terms of functionality, the new release will also include new analytics and business intelligence tools, including the Speech Server Analytics Studio, a SQL Server 2005-based product that will provide several predefined reports designed to allow managers to see high-level results and drill down to hear actual audio recordings. The Speech Server Business Intelligence Tools, meanwhile, shows managers long-term patterns in caller behavior, and provides ways to view the data using online analytical processing (OLAP) tools.

Since the release of Speech Server 2004 two years ago, more than 100 customers in the United States and Canada have purchased the software, which powers the logic for more than 40,000 telephony ports, Microsoft says. More than 10 million calls per month are processed on the platform, it says.