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There seems to be significant confusion on the new Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server role, publications on this new role are rare and not many folks are blogging on this important part of a Unified Communications deployment. My hope is that this blog will clarify some of the misconceptions and explain some of the work we have been doing with customers with this powerful technology. The Speech Server role can be installed independently or jointly with a full Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 deployment. This flexibility allows a customer to utilize both technologies together or separately based on an organizations requirements and goals for the solution. The Speech Server role can directly interface with an existing PBX or PSTN line utilizing a common SIP Gateway, the same SIP gateways that we have used on countless Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging deployments. As I mentioned earlier you can also choose to install Microsoft Office Communications 2007 and Speech Server 2007 to complement each other. In this scenario, your environment would include a Microsoft Office Communications Server Front End server role, Mediation Server role, Speech Server role and a SIP gateway.

Many organizations that could use the powerful applications provided by the Speech Server 2007 role today may not be ready for a full Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 for a multitude of reasons. What value can an organization gain by deploying Speech Server 2007? Allow me a least a few:

1. Many organizations rely heavily on Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. Many of these legacy solutions are not very flexible, are very expensive, and often the organizations have no internal knowledge of the system. Speech Server 2007 is an interactive solution that any .Net Developer can use to create complex call routing and IVR solutions. This reduces complexity and cost of these solutions allowing the customer to have additional flexibility and the ability to update the systems to better match their evolving business and business processes.
2. Another new advantage in Speech Server 2007 is a processing system called Conversational Understanding. It is a natural speech recognition and processing system that allows a caller to speak more naturally and the system to handle that more natural speech.
3. Lastly Speech server is VoIP enable out of the box, including Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) (define) and Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP). It has Analytics Studio and Business Intelligence Tools to provide users with customized, detailed usage reports. Analytics Studio provides a variety of predefined reports while Business Intelligence Tools provide managers with a long-term view of a callers behavior.

    

Below I have outlined a simple scenario that we deployed at a customer site for a pilot of these solutions:

1. The call originates from the PSTN to the PBX, and is routed to Analog/Digital ports connected to the SIP Gateway.
2. The SIP gateway then converts the TDM signal to SIP and routes to the Speech Server.
3. This scenario assumes SIP transactions will use TCP port 5060 and the Speech Server has an application using 200 as an Identifier.

 

How did we configure the gateway?

 

1. Go to Configure IP – input IP info

 

 

 

 

 

1. Next go to System – Operating mode as SIP and PCM coding as Ulaw
   

 

 

 

1. Next enter you VoIP endpoint ID – in this case it would be the Speech Server 192.168.0.100

 

 

 

 

 

1. Next Select Gateway Advanced – Send DNIS to VoIP Endpoint - Yes

 

 

 

 

 

1. Next go to Dial Plan and Select CPID Manipulation Create a Speech server rule and add "200" as the Redirect Party Change Rule, Make sure it is the first rule.

This will reference the Speech server application using EXT 200 as the Identifier.

 

 

 

 

 

1. Next select the Inbound TDM Routing Tab – Create a Rule called Speech Server with these settings and apply the Speech server CPID manipulation rule created previously.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Next Configure SIP – set Transport type TCP under User-Agent, Under TCP/UDP set server port as 5060

 

 

 

 

 

1. Next Select Restart and Restart the gateway of good measure

 

 

 

 

 

1. Finally call Extension 200 from an internal PBX extension, Speech Server should answer with whatever Voice application was assigned to the 200 Identifier.

Robert Ziolkowski
Voice Consultant
Project Leadership Associates