Microsoft has confirmed a March 24 launch date for the Standard and Enterprise editions of Speech Server 2004.

Combined with the Speech Server and Speech Application Development Kit (SASDK), Speech Server 2004 has crystallized Redmond's effort to establish a comprehensive speech platform for developing, deploying, testing and managing Web-based speech-enabled telephony and multimodal applications.

To drive its Speech platform, Microsoft has instituted the Speech Partner Program.  During the beta program over 50 members joined the Speech Partner Program in addition to 500 enterprises who signed on to evaluate the code.  Additional partnerships are expected to be announced during the launch event.

"Through commitment and actions, our new and existing partners are activating the mainstream adoption of speech.  We're excited about the Speech Server-based applications and services our partners will be bringing to enterprise customers," said James Mastan, director of marketing for the Speech Server product group at Microsoft.

Microsoft's Speech Server technology is based upon the Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) standard, which competes with VoiceXML, another emerging speech standard.  The company has made it easier for developers to build applications for its SALT-based platform by interfacing SASDK with Visual Studio .NET 2003.

Despite leveraging Visual Studio, Microsoft may find it difficult to break into a market that generally favors VoiceXML.

"MS Speech is still limited in its penetration - the technology that has high momentum and broad deployment is VoiceXML," Art Schoeller, Senior Analyst at The Yankee Group, told BetaNews.

"VoiceXML and SALT pretty much are direct competitors, if you can call 'standards' competitors.  Microsoft will never support VoiceXML, whereas other speech technology vendors such as Scansoft and Nuance support VoiceXML and then SALT to cover their bets.  Some vendors are a little more aggressive in their support for Microsoft / SALT but they know that the volume of deals are VoiceXML," said Schoeller. 

Microsoft has conducted years of internal research dedicated to speech, and purchased Entropic in 1999 to bolster its speech recognition capabilities. It has longstanding partnerships for its speech technologies with Intel and Intervoice.

In addition to losing appeal by not supporting the more popular VoiceXML standard, Redmond faces considerable competition from AT&T, Lucent, and IBM - all of whom have poured resources into developing alternate solutions.

IBM holds over 150 patents regarding speech, and once filed suit against Microsoft for allegedly violating one of its speech patents.