Microsoft will integrate speech into a future version of Microsoft Exchange Server.

NEW YORK — Aug. 2, 2005 — At the annual SpeechTEK Exposition and Educational Conference in New York, Microsoft Corp. today announced that multiple companies have chosen Microsoft® Speech Server (MSS) as their platform of choice for building and deploying speech-enabled enterprise solutions, signifying growing adoption and demand by enterprise companies for a lower-cost scalable speech solution built on .NET Framework- and Windows®-based infrastructure. Companies from a variety of leading industry verticals, including finance, retail, healthcare and government, will deploy MSS in the coming months, expanding the MSS customer list to more than 60 companies that have invested in the platform. Most recently, Fingerhut; King Pharmaceuticals Inc.; Sandia National Laboratories; and the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles chose MSS for their enterprise speech solutions.

“These customer wins are a strong validation that Microsoft Speech Server is an enterprise-ready product in high-end call center implementations as well as a catalyst for opening up a variety of new speech-enabled applications such as driver’s-license renewal, password reset and employee productivity solutions,” said Rich Bray, general manager of the Speech Server group at Microsoft.

Microsoft also announced today that as part of its continued efforts to help make speech mainstream, it is expanding its speech technology efforts beyond the call center and interactive voice response markets into the broader enterprise unified messaging market by integrating speech technologies into a future release of Microsoft Exchange Server.

“We’re very excited about this partnership with Exchange and believe that offering speech-enabled unified messaging capabilities to the millions of Exchange users will go a long way to help achieve the goal of driving speech mainstream,” Bray said.

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News Source: www.microsoft.com