I've had my doubts about Speech Server being part of this group but have stuck with it. Text-to-speech and IVR's are absolutley a core of unified comms solutions. That said they require development and their set of expierience to make them user friendly. So my faith has been vindicated today by the annoucement that Speech Server 2007 will ship as part of Office Communications Server 2007, the next release of LCs.
The full announcement is at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/aug06/08-08MSSpeechTechPR.mspx.
It's a real cliche in this space but.... interesting times :)
Russ Kirk
russ.kirk@GreyConvergence.no.spam.com