Microsoft has rechristened its speech-application development platform and moved ahead with several key components, company officials said Wednesday.

Formerly known as the .Net Speech platform, Microsoft's Speech Server platform is designed to build and run speech-enabled Web software, such as call center and other telephony-based applications.

"This is part of our effort to make speech mainstream," says XD Huang, general manager of the Microsoft speech group.

Huang says Microsoft plans to play up the platform's ability to support both desktop systems and mobile devices like Smartphones and Pocket PC PDAs using the same code base — a capability that ultimately will result in lower total cost of ownership.

The Speech Server platform is comprised of four key components. These are a speech server that recognizes speech, and plays audio prompts and responses back to the user; a telephony server for connecting to the telephone network (a component now called "telephony application services); an Internet-Explorer-based client browser and Microsoft's ASP.Net Web server for hosting applications.

Microsoft's Speech Server platform will run on top of Windows Server 2003 and will be a member of the Windows Server System family of products once it ships in the first quarter of 2004, according to the company. The final product will be compliant with Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) standards, Microsoft says.

Read More on Microsoft's Speech Server In This White Paper

On Wednesday, Microsoft said it would make Beta 1 of its speech server available to 100 software partners, customers and other testers. Last fall, 11 "Joint Development Partners" were designated as testers for an earlier version of the product.

Interested testers can apply to join the beta on the Microsoft
SpeechTech Beta site.

Microsoft also made beta 3 of the speech toolkit, the speech application software development kit, available to testers on Wednesday, as well.

Microsoft officials said they expect the speech platform to be deployed heavily in the healthcare, financial services and travel markets, among others.