Microsoft Buys Tellme
Wow big news in the speech industry today: Microsoft to Aquire Tellme Networks.
Items of interest:
"Potential areas of development resulting from the deal will range from
hosted voice-enabled customer service solutions that complement
Microsoft’s existing unified communications offerings to voice user
interfaces in existing Microsoft products to search services on mobile
phones that integrate with Live Search for mobile offerings. In
addition, developers and partners will be able to build new
speech-based solutions on top of a scalable, standards-based
voice-enabled applications platform."
Hosted voice-enabled solutions? Cool.
"Unified communications. Tellme’s voice-enabled services and solutions for enterprise customers complement Microsoft’s unified communications voice services portfolio. This will allow customers and industry partners to build highly scalable voice solutions that leverage rich identity, presence, messaging and application integration."
Wonder how they are going to integrate the different products?
"Speech platform. Tellme’s robust voice-enabled platform helps open new doors for Microsoft’s hundreds of thousands of developers and partners to build innovative speech solutions based on open standards."
As TellMe states on their web site: The Largest and most reliable VoiceXML Platform in the world. (I thought Intervoice was?)
"Software plus services. In the long term, Tellme technology will enhance Microsoft’s many voice-enabled applications, including the Windows Vista™ operating system, the Microsoft Office system, and mobile applications such as Windows Mobile® and Windows® Automotive."
Well, sounds like a big win for Microsoft?
The VOIP and Gadgets Blog weighs in on the news and presents a hypothetical solution:
"hypothetically speaking, a user could pick up
their phone or LCS (Live Communications Server) client and use speech
recognition to initiate a call". So indeed, enterprises that deploy OCS
2007 could leverage Tellme's speech-recognition technology. I
hypothesized "so a user could pick up their phone, speak a contact
name, the call is routed via SIP to a Tellme server for speech
analysis, and then the call could be either connected directly via
Tellme, or the SIP-based call could be handed back to the enterprise
with the "speech rec analysis" attached and then have the customer
premise PBX or SIP gateway initiate the call to the proper contact.
Some of the Microsoft representatives simply nodded their heads in
agreement that this was indeed "theoretically" possible."
Tellme has a link to some interesting articles.
One article has this to say for developers:
"Microsoft will also
target its ISVs and other partners to build new speech-based products
or services on top of Tellme Networks' standards-based platform. What
that means to developers working with Microsoft's existing speech server platform is not yet clear."
Very interesting...
What do you think? Leave your comments below...
Technorati Tags: Microsoft Speech Server