Review of Microsoft Speech Team's PDC Presentation

Microsoft Speech bloggers have posted links to their speech team's recent PDC presentations. If you're interested in keeping a pulse on what Microsoft is up to in the speech area, its worthwhile to view this material, kindly made available online for everbody's benefit. In particular you'll gain insight into how speech integrates into Vista and WinFx.

In general, Microsoft is doing a reasonably good job at incorporating speech technology into the Vista desktop. There is no doubt this will help push speech technology into the mainstream, as the initial speaker claimed.

The Speech Server presentation though was a real sleeper. Not only were the demos rather poorly executed, the technology itself is stuff most of us in this field were building and shipping in speech server products in the late 90s. Its amazing that a company of Microsoft's calibre would have people on stage giving prototype demos of use case scenarios that their competitors in the speech server industry were shipping as products 6+ years ago, not to mention the fact that the technology is long past early adopter stage and well entrenched in the form of mature W3C standards, not to mention market share. In 1 hour 21 minutes of talking about speech technology, if I'm not mistaken, not once did the "V" word get mentioned. Come to think of it, I'm not recalling any mention of the "S" word (as in SALT) either, but than again, its likely if they did say it, the naughty word filter on my XHTML+Voice browser would have beeped it out. ;-)

Robert Brown summarized 3 take-aways at the end of the presentation:

1. Windows Vista is a great speech platform.
2. WinFx has a very powerful speech API built into it.
3. Speech Server is a great way to deliver speech apps to users wherever they are via their "ubiquitous" phone.

We'd have to agree and applaud the first two bullets, though we'd qualify the first by noting that Windows Vista is a great desktop speech platform. Its also cool to see a platform emerge that no doubt will be on desktops everywhere in the future, that has speech APIs designed into it as an integral feature, rather than an add-on API/library that got slapped on after the fact and is not well integrated with the rest of the platform. This will no doubt result in more speech-enabled desktop applications, since developers knows the functionality will always be there on Vista. When speech was an add-on component, developers wouldn't bother using it in their apps as making sure the speech functionality was available on the target platform meant lots of additional work.

As I've already suggested, I have to disagree with the Brown's third take away. Clearly, it cannot be contested that VoiceXML is the reigning champion these days in the rather healthy speech server industry, and until Microsoft Speech Server supports VoiceXML, they'll continue to find themselves rowing up stream against a mighty strong current.

All in all though, its an interesting presentation and worth taking a look at.

View the presentation.