Microsoft on Wednesday moved toward the integration of call centers and the Web with the release of the first public beta of its Speech Server and a new beta version of its Speech Application Software Development Kit (SDK).

The software platform is designed to host voice-based services similarly to the way Web servers host a company's Web site, as well as supporting "multimodal" applications that take advantage of both voice and Web interfaces. It is based on Speech Application Language Tags (SALT), an extension of current scripting languages including HTML and XML.

Companies that need call centers can cut costs by automating them on the server, said Xuedong Huang, general manager for Microsoft speech technologies. Among other things, the server can interpret callers' requests and provide recorded or synthesized responses. Developers also can integrate the voice-based services with Web-based applications that can continue to run on a Web server as they do now. For example, a caller could ask for a stock quote verbally and have it displayed on a handheld device, he said.

The beta version of the server can deliver voice-only services to a wired phone and multimodal services to any device with a screen that uses either a wired or a IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN connection to the server. Other wireless technologies will be supported later, Huang said. The software includes a speech recognition engine for handling users' speech inputs and a prompt engine to bring up prerecorded prompts from a database to play for users. It also has a text-to-speech engine that can synthesize audible prompts from a text string when a prerecorded prompt is not available. In addition, it has a SALT Interpreter and other components to support services to callers.

The SDK, a set of tools and controls based on SALT, lets developers build telephony and multimodal applications. Microsoft released it Wednesday in its third beta version. The SDK is designed to make it easy for developers to incorporate speech functionality into Web applications and to build speech applications using Visual Studio .Net 2003, according to a statement by Microsoft. New features in the third beta include Pocket Internet Explorer Bits for Pocket PC access to Microsoft Speech Server applications, a simulation of the Speech Server and preset controls for managing responses containing digits and letters, such as credit card numbers.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.