Speech Application Workflow Projects Rock!
The greatest addition to MSS 2007 is Speech Application Workflow projects, it uses WF (Windows Workflow Foundation). WF and Speech, what's not to love?! While, I am not as excited as some others are about the additions, such as VoiceXML, it's probably because I do not consider my self an IVR developer, but a .Net developer. I love doing ANY .Net applications, but IVR applications holds a special place with me from when I was doing purely IVR development, before .Net came around. I used to work with Edify for IVR development, which was bought by Intervoice. You just can't compare any other IVR platform to MSS, why businesses aren't going out in masses trying to upgrade their existing IVR applications to .Net is beyond me.
I know some of the pure IVR guys will probably hunt me down for saying this but IVR applications are not that different from any other business application. With MSS you can develop an IVR application with the same tools and language that you write your other business applications, you can even reuse your code from your other applications to use on your IVR application. For example if you have a Windows Application that was written using say CSLA, there is no reason why you can’t reuse those business objects and the data access layer of that application, in your IVR application. (This isn’t new, you could have done this with MSS 2004, just MSS 2007 gives you 2.0 support.)
I would love to see the speech application controls a part of VS instead of a separate install. Maybe include it in the WinFx .Net Framework 3.0? (Probably, will not ever happen but why not?)
I’ve been thinking of a sample application to build. My thoughts are to do something “useful”, I am going to take the CSLA sample application, it’s a project management type of application, and turn it into a "speech application", using the existing business object. Why? Because I can…
Expect samples soon...