Tuesday, August 08, 2006 - Posts

Office Communications Server

Today from the SpeechTEK 2006 conference in New York, Rich Bray, general manager Unified Communications Group at Microsoft 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, IP 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.

Today, the Speech Server platform is trusted by a number of major Microsoft customers to successfully answer millions of customer calls,” said at  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. - Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president of the Unified Communications Group .

Q&A: The Future of Speech Technologies

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.

GetHuman Standard

Yesterday at the annual SpeechTEK conference in New York, Paul English announced in his keynote address the creation of a new GetHuman Standard for customer service phone systems. Microsoft and Nuance are working with Paul, and other companies are expected to join. Learn more about the Gethuman Earcon.

I'm thrilled to work with Microsoft and Nuance on these important standards. Consumers have put up with bad customer service over the phone for too long, and this new initiative will put some sanity back into how companies interact with their customers. Microsoft and Nuance are two of the key companies who can help make consumer-friendly phone systems a reality, and we are seeking other companies to join us in this effort. - Paul English

At Microsoft, we believe that powerful software combined with customer-friendly standards like this can elevate voice self-service to be a preferred solution for many tasks, just as the ATM and airport kiosk are today, We look forward to working with Paul and the GetHuman project to incorporate community feedback and drive continuous improvement in the experience people have with voice applications - Rich Bray, general manager Unified Communications Group at Microsoft.

Nuance has been a consistent champion of best practices in speech-automated customer support with thousands of implementations and dozens of award-winning systems, Paul's proposal for these standards is consistent with our Human Touch efforts, and we are excited to collaborate with Paul to accelerate the adoption of these best practices. - Peter Mahoney, VP of worldwide marketing, Nuance Communications .

I enjoyed Paul's Keynote yesterday, for the first time at SpeechTEK  we heard what we consumers of IVR systems think about the service and it's great to see a few big players in this space listening. It was fun meeting Paul because we compeate on Google, he is ranked as the number 17 Paul and I'm 18, but maybe with this post using the name Paul so much I might pass him.....