"Our goal is to make speech technology more cost-effective and accessible to a broader range of enterprise customers," said Xuedong Huang, general manager of the Speech Technologies group at Microsoft. "After more than 10 years of research and a wealth of beta tester feedback, Microsoft and our industry partners are ready to turn speech -- the most natural form of interaction -- into a mainstream technology that provides significant business value to enterprise customers."
To allow unlimited functionality, Microsoft provides the Speech Application SDK (SASDK) for custom development and integration of speech applications. The Microsoft SASDK is a set of tools and ASP.NET controls based on the SALT specification that enables developers to build both telephony and multimodal applications.
Microsoft Speech Server new features:
- Easier deployment and management of speech-enabled applications through a Microsoft Management Console Speech Server snap-in
- Support for multiple applications
- Enhanced server manageability, performance and scalability
- Updated Microsoft-developed, enterprise-grade Automatic Speech Recognition and prompt engines
- Support for ScanSoft Inc.'s Speechify Text-to-Speech Engine 3.0
Microsoft Speech Application SDK Advancements:
- Simplified programmatic access to the active QA control, which provides developers with greater control and flexibility
- Comprehensive command and exception history, enabling developers to more easily implement complex exception-handling rules
- Complete access to all the data of computer supported telecommunications applications
- A new command line tool for editing prompt databases, making it easy to apply recurring or short-notice changes in a production environment
- Speech add-in 1.0 for Microsoft Pocket Internet Explorer, which now supports network detection, enabling developers to control application response to changes in network status
- The Speech Debugging Console, which lets developers debug Pocket PC speech-enabled application code
- Banking Alerts reference application, which allows developers to integrate with Microsoft SQL Server Notification Services for generating notifications and includes an updated voice user interface
Further details on Microsoft's speech technologies are available
here.
Related Stories:
