Microsoft has made an announcement that its voice recognition technology would be embraced in its forthcoming VoIP hub. The company would be discontinuing its Microsoft Speech Server 2007 and its capabilities would be made a part of their Office Communications Server 2007. It is an all in one combo for IP telephony, instant messaging, voice response, video and audio conferencing.

It was at the SpeechTek conference that the company demonstrated how Speech Server capabilities could be integrated with presence information which allows the system to inform a caller that the person that they were trying to call is on the phone. It also showed a conversation where one user used speech and other IM. The system made use of speech to text and text to speech in order to bridge the two interfaces.