Technical Articles

Local government is constantly trying to find ways to do more with fewer resources. Customer service departments are overtaxed by the number of inquiries and requests they receive every day. The benefits of speech-enabled Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions continue to grow.

Call Centers are forever focused on providing valued customer experiences at affordable rates. Call Centers have evolved into Contact Centers and are no longer a "cost center" but a "strategic differentiator" viewed as an asset of the organization. New technologies have been very instrumental in the transformation of Call Centers. By streamlining processes and measuring results, management has ever increasingly been empowered with the tools to focus on the problems and implement improvements. Using a Microsoft Speech Server-based solution, integrated with Envox’s CT Connect CTI server, an economical solution with scalability can now be offered as a packaged application addressing all sizes of the market: the Primas Post Call Survey application.

Today's healthcare market continues to face difficult challenges including escalating medical costs, changing healthcare standards, increasingly demanding government mandates, and growing competition. Additionally, with a much more knowledgeable customer base demanding better products and services, the ability to remain profitable is becoming extremely difficult. The key to improving service to patients and providers, while also reducing costs, is greater efficiency. This article explores how automated speech self-service applications on Microsoft® Speech Server (MSS) can help generate that efficiency.

Technology is changing the way people shop and the way people communicate with retail stores. Customers want 24 by 7 access to shopping, order status information, and account information. Speech is one of the enabling technologies that gives customers the anywhere, anytime access that they seek. All customers need is a telephone to shop, get order status, or access their account. This article describes how retailers are using speech technology and the benefits speech provides.

Innovation and adaptation are critical to industry leadership. As the world economy gains momentum in its long-delayed recovery, retail banks are reinventing themselves as flexible, dynamic sales organizations at the front end, and efficient, low-cost processors at the back end. Driving this reinvention is intense local and global competition. The key to staying ahead lies in leveraging all available customer relationship management mechanisms — in order to ensure that retail banking customers can get what they need when they need it, while ensuring that banking operations have real-time, relevant access to information about customers and critical operations across the enterprise.

Have you ever wondered why building a voice user interface (VUI) isn’t as easy as building a GUI? You know how to build a Web GUI in an hour or two, so why isn’t there a toolkit that lets you do the same for a VUI? A VUI toolkit is now available.

So you want to write a speech application. Great! Judging from consumer trends, you're still ahead of the market, and a good speech app can increase your customer satisfaction while decreasing your operating costs.

Intel has just released Intel Netmerge® Call Manager v1.2, which is telephony interface management (TIM) software that supports the new Microsoft Speech Server 2004 R2 Standard and Enterprise Editions. Microsoft and Intel have worked together closely to deliver this cutting-edge telephony platform, which simplifies the construction and integration of speech into new or existing Web Service applications.

With the release of Microsoft Speech Server (MSS) 2004 R2, Microsoft Corp. takes another step forward in its strategy to enable enterprises of all sizes to better serve existing customer needs, drive operational efficiencies, and create the next generation of customer service applications.

The telecom industry is undergoing a major paradigm shift away from proprietary networks and channelized switching and transmission equipment. The new paradigm is a modular topology marked by open standards, general-purpose hardware, and broadband economics. More and more, data and voice communications are merging across carriers, business enterprises, and consumer networks-both wired and wireless.

Organizations of all sizes have used Touch-Tone interactive voice response (IVR) systems to automate various customer-facing business processes. While these Touch-Tone IVR systems can save money, they also have inherent drawbacks such as complex menu structures and difficult caller navigation. Speech recognition technologies can resolve many of these shortcomings. Transforming a dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF) system into a speech-enabled solution can boost automation levels, raise customer satisfaction, and increase operational efficiency.

SpeechWatch™ Unified Monitoring and Alarming for the Microsoft Speech Server Environment
The growth of e-business over the past five years has led to an explosion in the number of interactions that companies have with their customers. Enterprises must now plan for customer and employee interactions not only through a call center but through multiple other touch points including the Web, cell phones, e-mail, personal data assistants (PDAs), and other hand-held devices.

Microsoft Speech Server, along with our partners, are enabling a broader range of enterprise customers to reap the significant business value of speech technology through voice-enabled password reset applications built on Microsoft Speech Server 2004.

The manner in which you assign telephony channels to inbound applications varies depending on the type of telephony board you are using, the configuration of your private branch exchange (PBX) switch, and the topology of your Web servers. Microsoft Speech Server (MSS) supports four types of telephony boards: two analog boards and two digital boards. The following article explains how to assign channels for each type of board, how to assign multiple channels to an application, and how to assign channels to an application deployed across multiple Web servers.

Recognizing alphanumeric strings is a common task used by wide variety of applications. Gathering policy numbers, catalog numbers, license plate numbers, etc., are typical tasks that involve alphanumeric recognition. These particular tasks can however also be one of the most challenging ones for a speech recognition engine since many letters and numbers sound very similar and even present a challenge for human listeners. This article offers insight into the difficulty of recognizing alphanumeric strings and gives tips on how to leverage information about the structure of these strings to significantly improve recognition accuracy.

Improvements in speech technology and the increased use of PDAs, mobile voice, and multi-modal devices are combining to propel the development and deployment of speech-enabled applications. Incorporating speech as a viable user interface offers a degree of flexibility to users who previously have been limited to fix-placed Web browsers or hierarchical interactive voice response (IVR) menu schemes.

Many developers, and in particular those that are new to Microsoft Speech Server and telephony, have experienced difficulties obtaining disconnect-call notification on analog cards. This issue is not unique to Microsoft Speech Server and the Intel® NetMerge™ Call Manager Telephony Interface Manager (TIM), but given the broad exposure of this exciting new technology, more developers than ever before may be confronted by it.

Telephony call control is an important part of speech-enabled or traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications. In addition to enforcing the business logic and correctly handling any speech input and output, applications must interact with the phone system for simple actions such as answering, making, disconnecting, and transferring calls.

Learn how to speech-enable your ASP.NET applications. This article will introduce you to the Microsoft Speech Application SDK and drill down into scenarios for building speech enabled web, telephony and mobile applications. Get a technical walk through for how to build dialogs, grammars and prompt databases using the Microsoft Speech Application SDK.

In this issue's feature focus, learn more about the release of Microsoft Speech Server 2004 and how it marks the shift of speech recognition from niche technology to mainstream application. Also, discover how leading communication technology partners are working with Microsoft to develop packaged speech applications and services through the Microsoft Speech Partner Program.