Microsoft Speech Server has Launched!

Speech Server 2004 has been launched!

After 5 years of working towards this day I can say that it's been amazing to see everything finally coming together so well. The demos worked flawlessly - the keynote speeches from both Bill and Kai Fu were extremely well received, and the interest we're seeing on our booths and on partners booths has been fantastic.

For me personally, probably the highlight was a private demo we gave to Bill on the stand before the doors opened. We demonstrated the New York Department of Education application which has been authored by Intervoice where parents can phone up and find out their child's attendence records etc. Despite one false start due to excessive background noise we were able to show it working pretty well.

I've spoken to a number of conference attendees today - I think we're finally seeing Microsoft becoming accepted as a major player in the Speech industry, and I've been really thrilled by the number of people who have been in the industry for years and are really looking forward to having a standard non-proprietary platform they can work against.

Major thanks to everyone who has put this all together - I'm just disappointed that not everyone on the team has been able to come. Huge thanks to everyone who has done their part on my team to make this vision a reality - Anthony Bowker, Dave Pickford, Harry Morgan, Mark Cecys, Nilkund Aseef, Dave Whitehouse, Joe Marin, Mike Miller, Meredith Shaw. I wish you could all be here. Thanks.