Microsoft News Tracker

In a nutshell, a beta of Speech Server 2007 will be released in May with the product release planned for late 2006. If you aren’t familiar with Speech Server 2007, it’s “Microsoft’s next-generation speech and telephony platform to help contact centers and businesses meet the challenge of reducing costs while improving automated customer service over the telephone.” Just think of it the next time you hear “Your call is important to us.”

The press release has more details on what is new in Speech Server 2007 including support for SALT, VoiceXML, and VoIP plus new analysis tools and a new .NET API. As for the bottom line:

Over the past two years, Speech Server 2004 has been embraced by more than 100 customers in the United States and Canada. More than 40,000 telephony ports of capacity have been licensed, and Speech Server customers are successfully answering more than 10 million calls per month on the platform.

Seems like a comfy niche.