Microsoft Updates Speech Server, SDK

Microsoft has announced the newest versions of its Speech Server and Speech Application Development Kit (SASDK). According to Redmond, the products constitute its efforts to establish comprehensive speech platform for developing, deploying, testing and managing Web-based speech-enabled telephony and multimodal applications.

July marked the Beta 1 release of the server as well as the third SDK beta.

Since that time, over 500 enterprises have signed up to evaluate the code in addition to 50 partners who joined the Speech Partner Program, with the ultimate goal being to make speech part of the mainstream.

"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."

This week's release adds new advancements to each of the products. The server -- a Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) based solution -- will see added support for multiple applications, improvements to its overall manageability, performance and scalability, as well as updated speech recognition. Support for ScanSoft Inc.'s Speechify Text-to-Speech Engine 3.0 has also been added.

Microsoft has added seven new features to SASDK Beta 4 - a toolkit that interfaces with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 development environment.

Upon completion in the first half of 2004, Speech Server is set to join Microsoft's Windows 2003 Server family of products. Pricing and packing details have yet to be announced.