REDMOND, Wash. — April 5, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today disclosed the road map and first set of features of its upcoming release of Microsoft® Speech Server 2007. Beginning in May, beta testers will have the opportunity to preview and provide feedback on Speech Server 2007, which is planned for release in late 2006. Speech Server 2007 is Microsoft’s next-generation speech and telephony platform to help contact centers and businesses meet the challenge of reducing costs while improving automated customer service over the telephone. Speech Server 2007 will provide full support for Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) and Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML), which will enable customers to choose the development standard that will work best in their environment. In addition, Speech Server 2007 can easily plug into existing telephony infrastructures to deliver more cost-effective and integrated customer-service operations. Contact center and business managers will also have access to new monitoring tools that can identify performance issues and opportunities to help ensure that the system is efficiently and accurately addressing caller inquiries.