Marshall Harrison - "the gotspeech guy"

An Email From Microsoft

An excerpt from an email I received a few minutes ago:

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Communications Server technical communities during the past year.

This means a lot to me as it marks my 5th year of being awarded. And it comes on the eve of the greatest release of OCS yet. I love the next version and what it means for IVR development and I'm really looking forward to the next year.

New UCMA 2.0 Release

Without much fanfare Microsoft released a significant update to the Microsoft Unified Communications Managed API 2.0 last weekend.

This release is not only significant given the impressive set of new features, but most of all because it provides direct interoperability of the UCMA 2.0 with major VoIP Gateways and IP-PBXs. Where till today a developer needed to connect UCMA based applications to such 3^rd party products via Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2, you can now build voice applications like IVR, ACD, Call Recording, etc. directly connected to a Dialogic, Audiocodes, Cisco or Avaya SIP connection (these are typically the ones tested by Microsoft).

Other new features include:

1. Support of UCMA 2.0 Core deployment on 64-bit client Windows Operating Systems (Windows Vista SP1 and Windows 7) – so now also applications
2. Support for UCMA 2.0 on Windows Server 2008 R2.
3. Support for diversion.
4. Support for in-band FAX tone detection (CNG 1100Hz).
5. Introduction of the UCMA 2.0 Core Runtime to ease deployment
6. Support for Privacy settings.
7. Support for (“Split-Domain”) deployment in hybrid deployments where an enterprise is using the same domain for both Exchange Online as well Exchange on-premises.
8. Introduction of the default routing endpoint concept to build voice services. The default routing endpoint enables an application to process incoming SIP requests that are received by a CollaborationPlatform instance, that are not promptly dispatched to another ApplicationEndpoint on the same CollaborationPlatform, based on the ApplicationEndpoint owner or Conversation information matching the incoming request. Instead of being automatically declined by the CollaborationPlatform, such a received request is raised on the default routing ApplicationEndpoint, when one exists. This enables an application to process these requests.
9. Introduction of support for SIP DNS load balancing where UCMA 2.0 Core SDK is now capable of load balancing outbound SIP requests to a next-hop proxy with multiple front ends using DNS A records.
10. Voice call setup failure troubleshooting info, and Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring allowing applications to display key indicators for voice quality (Jitter, voice quality score, etc) in their reporting framework against Communications Server and SIP PSTN Gateways/IP-PBXs.
11. Support for sampling rate for both audio stream directions.
12. Support for modifying playback speed.
13. Support for Recorder with Enhanced features.

A lot of these features were released to enable Exchange Unified Messaging to migrate from Speech Server to the UC Managed API. But as a side effect the UC Managed API has become a very attractive platform to build custom IVR applications on and even more sophisticated contact center applications as demonstrated at VoiceCon.

The update can be found here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=187420

The UCMA 2.0 redist here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=164007

And the new UCMA 2.0 Runtime here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=163815

There is a KB article posted here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977547/EN-US   (Note: my original post ahd the wrong link)

Followup to my Redmond Trips

In Redmond for training

I'm in Redmond through Tuesday for training then fly home and come back next week for another week of training.

Unfortunately everything I am working on these days is under NDA so I can't blog any details. But I can say that I love where Microsoft is headed.

And I'll lots of blog posts ready when the NDAs are lifted.

Odd & Ends – What’s happening around GotSpeech Central

2010 MVP Global Summit - Well, it has been about two weeks now since I got back from my Redmond Trip and I’ve had time to recover and regroup. I’m getting too old for 17 hour days in the wrong time zone and redeye flights. On the return trip I went 36 hours without any sleep and it took a few days to recover from that.

But the trip was worth it. I had a chance to connect again with some of my OCS MVP friends and meet some new ones. I also spent 3 days in a classroom with the product team. I can’t talk much about what I saw and heard as everything was under NDA (they really pushed that home this time) but I can say that I’m very encouraged about what the next release of OCS will bring us. I can say this – you should be brushing up on your WPF and WCF skills. I’ll blog more on what the future holds in store for IVR developers as soon as I get permission.

GotSpeech SIP Lab – I blogged before on the lab setup I have in my office. Well that has grown some with the addition of two more laptops, another server and my virtualization server. As I’m writing this I have a full OCS implementation running in VMs along with Speech Server 2004 and an OCS 2007 Speech Server VMs and the processor utilization is not an issue staying well below 30%.

Recently I decided to beef up the telephony side of my lab with several additions. I purchased a DID from DIDforSale (20 simultaneous calls) and a DID from Via:Talk. The Via:Talk DID has two lines and I’ve terminated them into a LinkSys PAP2 phone adaptor so that I now have two more analog lines terminate into my Dialogic gateway giving me a total of 4 analog ports which allows me to handle multiple calls and transfers.

The DIDforSale SIP line terminates into a FreeSWITCH gateway running on a Win2K VM. Of course all the new phone lines get directed to Speech Server. This is working well except that I have the same early audio problem that Brian has. I’ll be working on getting outbound dialing with DIDforSale working and the early audio problem over the coming weeks as time permits.

I have the Brekeke SIP Server installed and I’ll be configuring it also. The goal is to duplicate as many common deployment scenarios as possible.

GotSpeech forum cleanup – If you follow the member stats on GotSpeech you may have noticed something weird this past weekend – the total number of users dropped from 15,000 to 694 (back up to 889 as of this writing).

For about 2+ years now I have been the target of spammer bots setting up user accounts on GotSpeech and the problem got a lot worse in the last few weeks. They can create accounts but they can’t get into the forums so they have only been a minor nuisance. But that changed last month as the database grew beyond my allowed limits and I got charged for the extra DB space. In January I was able to shrink the database and stay below the limit but this time around I couldn’t get the database below about 545 MB. So I contacted OrcsWeb my hosting provider and worked with James to clean things up. after spending several hours last Saturday working with James we got the database size down to 304 MB – well within the limits of my plan. We ended up deleting any users that had never posted to the forums and truncated the exceptions table which hadn’t been cleaned out in several years. The net result is that the user count dropped drastically and now only includes people who have posted to the forums. If your account was deleted then join again and participate this time. That is why the forums are here; so that everyone can gain from other users but if you don’t post then no one gains.

I want to take this time to publicly thank (and recommend) OrcsWeb for all they have done for GotSpeech. Those guys are awesome. They are all geeks and if something is wrong they seem to take it as a personal challenge to get it fixed. Fast and friendly support is the norm for Orcsweb.

GotSpeech Consulting – I now have a new phone number for the business – 904.222.8880 provide by SpeechPhone. This gives me a personal assistant who can locate me wherever I am. And if I can’t take the call it allows the caller to leave a voice message. Pretty cool stuff.

I’m also looking for more consulting work so if you need training, mentoring  or development then give the number above a call. Things have been going well and I have even farmed some work out to other Speech Server developers. The only problem I seem to have is getting people to pay after I do the work. My accounts receivable past due invoices has gotten far larger than I am comfortable with.

GotSpeech Consulting is now a Microsoft Partner and I am pursuing partner alliances with two other companies one of which is located in Europe. The idea of working internationally is cool but I hate long airplane trips – I much prefer working remotely.

Speaking Engagements – I’ll be presenting at the Orlando Code Camp on March 27th which is not that far away. I’ll be presenting two sessions one on Speech Server development and one on OCS development. As you can see from the speakers page there is a great lineup of speakers and sessions – 19 MVPs plus some other great speaker talent. The code camp is free and the speakers are all donating their time and talent. The guys in Orlando always put on a good code camp and it is an easy drive from my house down to Orlando for the day. See you there.

In Redmond For the Microsoft 2010 MVP Global Summit

I’ll be in Bellevue/Redmond next week (14 – 19th) for the Microsoft 2010 MVP Global Summit. This will be my 4th Summit and I am really looking forward to it. It’s a long tiring week but if gives me a chance to reconnect with friends in the OCS Product group as well as my MVP friends. There are some new OCS MVPs that I am looking forward to meeting for the first time and of course there are those of us OCS MVPS that have several Summits under our belts.

I’ve also got some meetings with members of the old Speech Server group that have moved on to other projects. Its always good to see old friends.

I’m hoping to get a better understanding of where OCS is going along with the future of UCMA and Speech development.

I’ll be keeping an eye on things here and at GotUC.Net and though I may be slow in responding I'll still be monitoring email.

New GotSpeech join procedures

Lately GotSpeech has been bombarded with spam attempts to join. Not sure why they would do that but it is happening and as a result I’ve changed the way new members get approved.

It is now a manual process which allows me to filter out the spam. if you are legit and don’t get approved within 48 hours then email me.

I apologize for the inconvenience but the spammers make it tuff on all of us.

Microsoft Speech Technologies web site now live

New Microsoft Speech Technologies web site is now live.

Enjoy. I’m off to read all of the content.

GotSpeech on Twitter

You can now follow the GotSpeech Guy on Twitter. Just use this link and click on Follow - http://twitter.com/gotspeech

I’m finding that I use Twitter a lot for little things concerning Speech Server and OCS. Lots of things happen everyday that are interesting but don’t warrant a large blog post and I find that I’m just tweeting those things and saving my blog posts for more substantial stuff.

Enjoy.

Dynamic Grammars

I’ve been messing around with dynamic grammars and put some code together to show how it’s done. This was for a real world problem I was facing but the code is just a proof of concept that I used to get everything working.

I used the code shown below to create a DTMF grammar that takes from 1 to 4 digits. The resulting SML looks like this -

<SML text="1 2 3 4" utteranceConfidence="1.000" confidence="1.000">
        <slot confidence="1.000">1234</slot>
        4
</SML>

There is more than one way to create the grammars but this is what I came up with. Part of the goal was to utilize most of the grammar building methods available to me. The code to write the grammar out to a file was a big help in debugging the grammar. The first thing I did was use the Grammar Editor to create a grammar that did what I wanted. I then compared this to the generated grammar to make sure i understood what was happening with the different methods and classes.

        private Microsoft.SpeechServer.Recognition.Grammar buildDTMFGrammar()
        {
            string ValidDigits = "0123456789";
            // Create the root rule and set its scope
            SrgsRule rootRule = new SrgsRule("Rule1");
            rootRule.Scope = SrgsRuleScope.Public;

            // Create the oneof
            SrgsOneOf oneOf = new SrgsOneOf();

            // Create the slot name to use
            string slotName = "slot";

            // Create the items (need and inner and an outer to get
            // all the tags to work properly
            SrgsItem itemInner;
            SrgsItem itemOuter = new SrgsItem();

            // Create the first tag. We have to do it in two parts because the "{}"
            // part of the tag creates havoc with string.foramt()
            SrgsSemanticInterpretationTag sr3 = new SrgsSemanticInterpretationTag();
            string tagPartA = string.Format("$.{0} = $.{1} ? $.{2} : ", slotName, slotName, slotName);
            string tagPartB = string.Format("; $.{0}._value = \"\"", slotName);
            sr3.Script = tagPartA + "{}" + tagPartB;
            // Add the tag at the root level
            rootRule.Add(sr3);

            itemOuter.SetRepeat(1, 4);
            rootRule.Add(itemOuter);

            foreach (char t in ValidDigits)
            {
                itemInner = new SrgsItem(t.ToString());
                oneOf.Add(itemInner);
                SrgsSemanticInterpretationTag sr2 = new SrgsSemanticInterpretationTag();
                sr2.Script = "$._value = \"" + t.ToString() + "\"";
                itemInner.Add(sr2);
            }

            itemOuter.Add(oneOf);

            SrgsSemanticInterpretationTag sr4 = new SrgsSemanticInterpretationTag();
            sr4.Script = string.Format("$.{0}._value = $.{1}._value + $._value", slotName, slotName);
            itemOuter.Add(sr4);

            // Create the SRGS Document for A DTMF gramamr and add the root rule
            SrgsDocument srgsDocument = new SrgsDocument();
            srgsDocument.Mode = SrgsGrammarMode.Dtmf;


            srgsDocument.Rules.Add(rootRule);
            srgsDocument.Root = rootRule;
            string filePath = @"e:\mylogs\test.grxml";

            XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(filePath, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8);
            srgsDocument.WriteSrgs(writer);
            writer.Flush();
            writer.Close();
            Microsoft.SpeechServer.Recognition.Grammar dynamicGrammar = new Microsoft.SpeechServer.Recognition.Grammar(srgsDocument);

            return dynamicGrammar;
        }

After creating the grammar and assigning it to my questionAnswerActivity I was faced with the problem of how to get the recognition results. Since the grammar “slots” are created at runtime I can’t just use the standard method of referencing the key value – I don’t know the key name at coding time. The first thing I did was to search the forums on GotSpeech.Net but I didn’t find an answer there though I did get some ideas. Then I asked a few developer friends but it seemed no one had done anything quite like this. I was on my own on this one.

Well I thought of several approaches but none seem to practical. Most wouldn’t even compile for some reason or another or gave error messages about no public GetEnumerator. Well after spending some time in the debugger looking at the RecognitionResult object this is what I came up with. (note: I realize this will overwrite the values each time through the foreach loop but this was just to test that I can get to the proper values. In a real world app you would need to save them off).

            string password;
            string key;

            foreach (System.Collections.Generic.KeyValuePair <string, SemanticValue> si in this.questionAnswerActivity1.RecognitionResult.Semantics)
            {
                key = si.Key;
                password = si.Value.Value.ToString();
            }

I hope this helps someone and saves them some time.

2010 New Year’s Resolutions

Happy New year everyone!

2009 was a great year for OCS. For how good it was and where we should be going in 2010 see Unified Communications 2009 - A year in review by my friend and fellow OCS MVP Joe Schurman.

It is customary at this time of the year to make predictions and resolutions for the new year. I’m not very good at predicting things so I thought I would list my professional resolutions for 2010. These are the technologies and software that I want to become more proficient at this year.

Silverlight – I think that Silverlight will make a great web based front end for OCS. With it you will be able to provide chats between customers and your tech support staff or your customer service agents. The eLearning modules on GotSpeech are done in Silverlight and it is about time I put some effort into mastering it. The Expression Studio suite of tool sis something that I want to sink myself into.

Powershell – I’ve played around with this some and I love it. I want to learn how to use it to automate OCS and Speech Server tasks. Still need to find a development environment for it that I like and feel comfortable with.

Brekeke PBX- This is something I want to install and learn how to use. I have an 8 port  Dialogic Media Gateway in my home lab but I want to be able to setup the lab for direct SIP. First though I need a cheap (read free) SIP provider that I can use.

FreeSWITCH – Same reasons as above except that this is free and will allow small independent developers to setup their own environments without the costs of expensive hardware or software solutions. Many of my readers are using it so I need to know more about it. I’m looking forward to learning from the series that Brian has started on FreeSWITCH. I’m anxiously waiting for part 2.

UCMA 2.0 – This is the future of Speech development and I would like to delve deeper into it. I am convinced that there is going to be a huge need for developers that can enhance, extend and integrate OCS into enterprise level business processes. I would really like to get better at this and I am anxious to get my hands on the next release. I also think there will be a huge market this year for OCS/UCMA developer training. It would be very time consuming to develop OCS training but I think the need is there.

Then there are things like Wave 14 or OCS 2010, Office 2010, Exchange 2010  and Visual Studio 2010 that are just over the horizon.  Also, there is WCF, WPF and Linq that I have been avoiding as they don’t fit that well with Speech Server. But with OCS which has a visual interface and the possibility of extending things like Communicator there is so much for me to add to to my tool belt. Its going to be a busy year and I will need to budget my time accordingly.

And lastly I want to blog more and put more time into GotSpeech.Net and GotUC.Net. I want to get out an speak more as well as evangelize all the fascinating things that make up doing Unified Communications the Microsoft way.

Yes, 2010 is looking like a busy year for me.

What’s the story on Speech Server’s future?

What’s the story on Speech Server’s future?

Over the last few months I keep getting inquiries from people concerning the future of Speech Server 2007. They are interested in starting new IVR projects, converting MSS 2004 apps or moving from other platforms to Microsoft. Disappointingly Microsoft is keeping very quiet on this topic when asked, and promises more news only in Q1 of 2010.

Yet there is a lot of information out there in the public domain and I thought it would be useful to make a compile of all that information, till we get word from Microsoft on their roadmap.

1)      Microsoft is in the Speech business to stay

Microsoft has been investing in Speech technology since 1993, when XD Huang and other brains behind the best speech engine in the world (CMU’s Sphinx II), joined Microsoft. In 1999 it acquired the world renowned Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK) through an acquisition of Entropic, and it shelled out around 800 million dollar to acquire Tellme in March 2007.

And there are solid proof points that this investment is still considered valuable. The new General Manager of the Speech at Microsoft group, which united Tellme with the Speech Components Group, Zig Serafin, lists in the Microsoft press pass article a long list of key Microsoft products using Microsoft’s speech technology. Speech is part of Windows 7, and of Bing 411 directory assistance, and Bing for Mobile (now also for the iPhone!) has voice search. Exchange 2010 ships with the feature Voice Mail Preview in three languages, a feature that transcribes voice mails into readable text. Outlook Voice Access, a voice user interface to Exchange, now ships with support for 26 languages. And Tellme is apparently switching their platform over to Microsoft’s speech technology, phasing out Nuance’s ASR and AT&T’s TTS.

Most interesting announcement in 2009 however was that Xbox’s Project Natal will use speech recognition.

So, for all those tired of Nuance, Microsoft still seems to be the best bet.

2)      Speech Server 2007 is still going to be supported for quite a while

Though there were no changes in Speech Server since it shipped with OCS 2007, it still can compete with any IVR platform out there. To be honest, Speech Server is not the only IVR platform out there that is in maintenance mode. In the last few years most IVR platforms have disappeared from the market, or were bought by companies that have no interest in furthering them. Yet the critical question is: how long is Speech Server 2007 supported?

Well, Speech Server shipped as part of OCS 2007 and was reshipped unmodified in OCS 2007 R2. Microsoft server products follow strict support rules with a minimum of ten years of support: 5 years mainstream support, and 5 years of extended support. OCS 2007 R2 mainstream support however does not extend till beyond OCS 2007’s support term.

So Speech Server 2007 is supported product until January 2013. And then there is 5 more years of extended support beyond that date.

FYI, if you are still using Microsoft Speech Server 2004 or Speech Server 2004 R2, mainstream support has either run out July 2009, or is going to run out in October of 2010:

3)      The UC Managed API is the future

In October of 2006 Microsoft announced at SpeechTEK that Speech Server was to be integrated in its Unified Communications platform. On GotSpeech more details were given by Microsoft in response to my blog: in the next generation of the UC Managed API, there would be a VoiceXML browser, continued support for the Windows Workflow Foundation, and 26 languages. In a later blog post Microsoft asked to prioritize the speech tools.

Many people do not have access to the content that was presented at TechEd in May. Yet the best information of what is to come, was presented in the talk by Vishwa Ranjan and Albert Kooiman (subscribers only!). In the slides presented there, there are a couple of interesting slides:

-          Exchange 2010 SP1 Unified Messaging will move from Speech Server to the UC Managed API. That implies that by the time of Exchange 2010 SP1 the UC Managed API will be a viable alternative to Speech Server.

-          There are detailed slides comparing UCMA with Speech Server, also with the forward looking information in there regarding VXML and the speech tools.

GotSpeech Consulting looking for developers

Things are really starting to take off for GotSpeech Consulting and I am starting to look for some other resources – i.e. Speech Server developers.

So if you are interested in doing some development for GotSpeech Consulting please contact me and/or send me your resume. Most of the need at this point is for Speech Server but there may be some OCS UCMA development and web site work. This is all consulting work and I’m looking for both full and part time developers.

Currently I’m not setup to handle off shore developers though if you are off shore and want to send along your resume go ahead as things may change.

I’m Back…..

Yes, I am finally back after a 3+ week absence from just about everything computer related. I somehow caught a really bad cold that then got my sinuses infected and settled into my chest. The net result of all of this was that I just really didn’t feel like doing anything – especially things that required thinking. So no blogging, answering forum questions and no tweets. I pretty much just dropped out of site. Now I am way behind as my online life has been on hold for 3 weeks. Lots of catching up to do in the next few days.

But what better way to perk my interest and get back into the swing of things than with some new toys.

I ordered a Microsoft LifeCam Cinema HD webcam  and I’ve got it installed. Now I need to start playing with it and really put it through it’s paces. I want to use if for doing video casts, training videos  as well as use if for Live Meeting and Video calls with Office Communicator. I’ve tested it out in a video call but I believe there is something we have to set on the GotUC.Net OCS domain to do HD.

Brekeke SIP Server – I’ve downloaded this and have a license now I need to install, configure it and do an in depth evaluation of it. I may be using this in a a client project shortly so I want to gat familiar with it. Does anyone know where I can get a free SIP trunk to tie to this?

FreeSWITCH – this is another SIP gateway that I want to experiment with. I know several GotSpeech members are using it so I thought I would try it out and familiarize myself with it. The price is right and I understand that it is very extensible. Not sure when I can get to it but it is on my list of things to do.

While I was out I did manage a quick blog that Speech Server runtime is now supported on Windows 2008 Server. I’ll be trying that out shortly to see how well it works.

I still have some more VMs to create and some setup work that I want to do on my Virtualization Server Project so that is on my plate for this week or next.

As you can see I have lots to do so I guess the moral of the story is don’t get sick. Now I’m off to catch up on the GotSpeech forums and my task list.

As usual if you have comments or questions feel free to ping me. If you are using Office Communicator You can get me that way at marshall@gotuc.net.

Speech Server runtime now supported on Windows Server 2008

Well some good news and some not-as-good news - Microsoft will support application deployments, Administrative tools and Data Processing Utilities like the MssLogToDatabase and MssLogToText tools. However Microsoft will not support installation and usage of the Development Tools that include Speech Server (2007) application development, call data analysis and grammar tuning running on Windows Server 2008.

I’m glad to see Windows Server 2008 supported for deployment. It would be nice to have support for the other stuff but I can wait a while……..

Forgot to include the link - http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2009/10/20/640.aspx