Aspect Software and Microsoft Form Alliance to Offer Speech Solution

Aspect Software Inc., the world’s largest company focused solely on the contact center, today announced an alliance to deliver a solution targeted at small and midsize contact centers. The initiative will provide Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server as an embedded component of the Aspect® Unified IP™ product. This offering is designed to allow organizations to enjoy the benefits of high-end speech self-service features at a positive price point, and to leverage the reduced complexity of the unified solution while having greater control and increased contact center functionality.

“Small and midsize contact centers face unique challenges, and they need applications that will specifically address their distinct requirements,” said Mike Sheridan, senior vice president of strategy at Aspect Software. “Most importantly, they don’t want to sacrifice functionality; they want the full array of capabilities, just as large contact centers do. Working with Microsoft is allowing us to bring a solution to market that incorporates a full set of high-end features that supports these organizations’ customer contact strategies, including a fully featured speech capability.”

Aspect Unified IP incorporates an automatic call distributor, a voice portal, quality management, a predictive dialer and Internet connection in a single application. It also provides unified reporting, routing and administration functionality, and hosted capabilities with multi-tenancy, while running on the customer’s transport of choice: either voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) or time-division multiplexing (TDM).

Speech Server (2007) is Microsoft’s Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 2.0-certified speech and telephony platform and provides the tools, run-time environment, and state-of-the-art speech and telephony services needed for speech-enabled telephony applications on a single, integrated platform. Speech Server (2007) helps reduce the complexity and cost of building, deploying and maintaining speech-enabled applications for customer self-service applications, as well as outbound notification services.

The combined offering of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Speech Server and Aspect Unified IP 6.5, scheduled for release in July 2007, will help allow companies in the small and midsize contact center market to easily automate customer self-service calls, reduce time call-center agents spend on calls, improve customer interactions and add speech capabilities to line-of-business applications.