Microsoft Unveils Road Map for Speech Server 2007

Wednesday, April 5, 2006 2:57:00 PM

The Press release is here.

Microsoft Speech Home

Join the Beta  Invitation ID: MSS-7G3T-8P7V  (Full Instructions)

VoIP, SALT, VoiceXML all supported.

It looks hopeful that we will see a new dictation engine...

Speech Recognition Engine:
• Includes Microsoft enterprise-grade Automatic Speech
Recognition (ASR) engines supporting English (U.S.), Spanish (U.S.), and French (Canada) languages
(Source)

Also, according to this article Vista will support dictation.

Continuous speech recognition engines currently support two modes of speech recognition:

  • Dictation, in which the user enters data by reading directly to the computer.
  • ....

Hopefully we can dump the old 5.1 SDK and use a managed interface.

 

2 Comments

  • Philipp Schmid said

    Slow down my friend! You are talking about 2 different products: MSFT Speech Server 2007 and Windows Vista.

    While the 2 products share code and technology, they are 2 different things: MSS 2007 is a server product geared towards use in call centers and accessed via the telephone. Windows Vista will have speech recognition capabilities built in. It is used by the desktop user and a headset or desktop microphone. Vista uses dictation technology to facilitate rapid text entry - MSS will not (as most telephony applications do not rely on large text entry and the recognition accuracy is lower than for high-quality microphones).

    As for a managed interface, at PDC'05 we've announced (I was one of the presenters!) a managed speech API, System.Speech, which will ship as part of WinFX Runtime Components. Check it out in the WinFX beta and let us know what you think!

    - Philipp Schmid

  • Rob Chartier said


    I commented on both Speech Server and Vista because it would seem that MSFT is actually pushing into the ASR space, and not leaving it dead in the water. IIRC the previous version of the Speech SDK did not support ASR and as primarily focused around SALT, so we had to stick with the 5.1 SDK. Just nice to see that there is progress getting made with it.


    I will have to download the WinFX Beta and give it a try.


    Thanks Philipp!

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