Microsoft Talks Up Voice AppsMicrosoft Talks Up Voice Apps

To talk to Microsoft, press or say 1. The company is entering the market for applications that lead consumers through the thickets of automated customer-service menus.

Microsoft last week introduced a second beta version of its .Net Speech Software Development Kit, a plug-in to its Visual Studio .Net development tools suite that aims to get more programmers writing speech apps that use Microsoft tools and servers. The company also released an early test version of its .Net Speech Platform, a set of application-building components. The software is due next year.

If Microsoft is successful, it could increase demand for wireless phones, speech-recognition software, and PDAs--an area in which it's already gaining market share. On Oct. 22, Microsoft agreed to acquire Vicinity Corp., which makes software that can deliver maps and directions to cell phones and PDAs, for $96 million in cash. "Speech recognition has never really taken off the way people thought it would," says Brian Strachman, an analyst at market researcher In-Stat. "We need a broad base of applications, and Microsoft has a direct line to all the developers out there."

Microsoft's Office suite lets users dictate text using a microphone, and the vendor has published an API for building speech-capable Windows applications. But its latest effort focuses on selling software for call-center operations.

Microsoft hopes widespread use of its tools will encourage more companies to write apps that allow access to the same data either by telephone or over the Web. The approach, based on the Speech Application Language Tags specification, adds support for "multimodal" apps that can deliver textual and graphical output to computer and cell-phone screens, in addition to voice feedback. The language tags are an alternative to VoiceXML, a technology for voice-response apps backed by AT&T, IBM, and others.

Airlines and banks often maintain separate sets of application software logic for their Web sites and call centers, which is wasteful, says Kai-Fu Lee, a Microsoft VP who managed the company's Beijing research lab in the late '90s. "The Web is where the real-time, accurate data resides."