MSDN Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 56)

Michael Dunn Talk Voice Response Workflows With Speech Server 2007 mbedded presence, instant messaging (IM), audio and video conferencing, and telephony are among the unified communications features offered by Microsoft® Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007. Developers can build on an array of OCS APIs to include these and other features in their own applications. But OCS 2007 adds one new developer-centric feature you may not have heard about yet—interactive voice response (IVR) workflows based on the Microsoft Speech Server platform. Not sure what an IVR is? If you’ve ever called a company and heard a message like “press 1 for sales, press 2 for customer service,” then you’ve encountered an IVR system. ering the user interface of an IVR application. However, any nontrivial IVR application still needs to perform tasks such as accessing data from a database. For these tasks, server-side code, typically developed in a .NET-compliant language or Java, is still needed. And this somewhat diminishes the main benefit that SALT and VoiceXML intend to provide: cross-platform compatibility for IVR applications. From a developer perspective, using the .NET Framework as the basis for your IVR application development has significant benefits over SALT or VoiceXML, the main advantage being the ability Back This article uses the following technologies: Speech Server 2007, .NET Framework Voice App Basics Microsoft Speech Server 2004 only supported IVR development via the Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) API. The new version, OCS 2007 Speech Server (Speech Server 2007 for short), not only supports both SALT and VoiceXML but introduces a Microsoft .NET Framework API for creating IVR applications. Speech Server 2007 also includes a visual IVR application designer based on Windows® Workflow Foundation (Windows WF) called the Voice Response Workflow Designer. Current IVR development standards such as SALT and VoiceXML focus on using a Web-based development model relying on XML tags and JavaScript. Both of these standards focus on deliv56 msdnmagazine This article discusses: Voice response application basics Creating a voice response workflow ✥ Prompts, keywords, and grammars ✥ Handling user responses ✥ ✥ Code download available at: msdn2.microsoft.com/magazine/cc135911 Michael Dunn is a Senior Consultant at Microsoft. He is also the author of the book Pro: Microsoft Speech Server 2007. You can contact him via his blog at blogs.msdn.com/midunn. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/magazine/cc135911 http://blogs.msdn.com/midunn

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - April 2008

MSDN Magazine - April 2008 Contents Toolbox CLR Inside Out Basic Instincts Cutting Edge Foundations Test Run Service Station Windows with C++ Going Places { End Bracket }

MSDN Magazine - April 2008

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