Microsoft has offered a sneak peek of its forthcoming Speech Server 2007 speech and telephony platform.

Redmond's next-generation product is designed to provide automated customer service for call centres and contact centres.

Microsoft said that beta testers will begin to preview the software in May and provide feedback on the offering, which is planned for release in late 2006.

Speech Server 2007 will provide support for Speech Application Language Tags and VoiceXML. In addition, the product will be able to plug into existing telephony infrastructures and integrate with customer service applications.

With the newly included VoiceXML support, customers will be able to write World Wide Web Consortium's VoiceXML 2.1-compliant applications within Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and deploy those applications, or existing VoiceXML 2.1-compliant applications, on Speech Server 2007.

Speech Server 2007 also introduces a Microsoft .Net Framework-based API for low-level access to core Speech Server functionalities.

Companies can build applications on the Speech Server API using widely known programming languages such as JavaScript and C#, reducing time and development cost.