Microsoft's vision is that speech will become a mainstream, pervasive technology that is accessible by any device, at any time, and from any place. This means that speech-enabled applications should be accessible by standard telephones and cell phones, and by GUI (Graphical User Interface)-based devices like PDAs, Tablet PCs, smart phones, and desktop PCs. The Microsoft vision includes enabling the convergence of the Web infrastructure and voice systems into one infrastructure. With this convergence, speech-enabled and visual-only Web applications will become one unified application, developed using standard Web programming tools, based on Web standards, and running on your existing Web infrastructure.
Enterprises that adopt speech technology will accrue significant business value, including:
|
Making Speech MainstreamMicrosoft and its partners are working on a number of key market enablers that will help bring the business value of speech to mainstream enterprise companies. | • | Open Standards:
SALT (Speech Application Language Tags) is a W3C standard for speech-enabled telephony and speech+GUI (multimodal) applications. SALT is currently supported by over 70 industry leading companies and the number is always growing. |
| • | Common Platform:
A common and widely distributed platform for creating speech-enabled applications and services is necessary. Current proprietary platforms are complex, costly, and not widely distributed. The Microsoft Speech Platform offers a common platform, based on SALT, that can enable a broad ecosystem of applications and service providers to take speech mainstream. |
| • | Developer Excitement and Great Applications:
The development of speech applications has been hindered by a limited number of trained programmers, who use proprietary and complex tools. In contrast, there are more than 3 million developers trained on Microsoft's Web-based programming model. These developers will be able to build high-quality speech applications using the Microsoft Speech Application SDK, allowing them to leverage their existing Web programming skills. Microsoft's developer partners are excited about this new opportunity and will be creating great speech-enabled applications for enterprise customers |
| • | Industry Partnerships:
Making speech a widely available and pervasive technology is not an effort Microsoft is undertaking alone. Industry partnerships with a broad variety of hardware providers, software providers, and services companies are an important ingredient in helping to achieve the Microsoft vision. To this end, Microsoft has partnered with industry leaders to create the industry ecosystem necessary for a mainstream speech market. |
|
Cost to develop applications | Lower | Higher | Cost to deploy and maintain systems | Lower | Higher | Ability to leverage existing Web infrastructure investment |  |  | Integrated data and voice systems | | | Support of open standards | |  | Industry leading partnerships | | | Size of developer base | Millions | Thousands | Scalable and reliable | | | Support for both telephony and multimodal applications | | | Support for multiple speech engines | | | Integrated telephony platform, speech, and TTS engine | | | Support for touch-tone and speech-enabled application | | |
|
| | | | |
