Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging Beta Voice Mail Preview
One of the new features in Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging is Voice Mail Preview:
Exchange Server 2010 will facilitate the cumbersome task of navigating through voice messages. With Exchange Server 2010 speech-to-text translation, the user can read the contents of the audio recording in the same fashion they would read an e-mail. Furthermore, if the resulting voice messages are opened using Microsoft Office Outlook 2010, the text of the voice mail preview will become “actionable”. Recognized names, contacts, and phone numbers will all be identified with icons that the user can select to add contacts, call using Office Communicator, or send e-mail. To facilitate navigation of the audio, clicking in the text will cause the voice mail to jump to that word and continue playing.
Voice Mail Preview can be enabled or disabled by toggling ON/OFF the feature on the corresponding Unified Messaging Dial Plan or Unified Messaging Mailbox Policy:
Select this check box to allow users associated with the dial plan through a UM mailbox policy to receive a voice mail preview or transcribed text from a voice mail message left for them. The voice mail preview or transcribed text from the voice mail message will appear within the body of the voice mail message sent to the user.
Select this check box to enable or disable the Voice Mail Preview feature for users associated with the UM mailbox policy. Enabling this setting allows users to receive the text of a voice mail in the message body of an e-mail or text message. If this option is disabled on the UM dial plan, this feature won’t be available to UM-enabled users associated with the UM mailbox policy. This option isn’t available to UM-enabled users who have a mailbox on an Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging server. The default setting is enabled.
When this feature is enabled, Exchange 2010 UM-enabled users will receive voice mail messages with speech-to-text translations. In the following Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) screen shot, you can see the Voice Mail Preview:
As you can see, the Voice Mail Preview displays the transcription (e.g. speech-to-text) of the voice mail message. For comparison, click here to listen to the actual voice mail message.
Note, the speech-to-text translation will not always be 100% accurate. There are a lot of variables that will affect this. Your mileage may vary.
To determine whether or not you like the Voice Mail Preview feature, try receiving a minimum of ten voice mail messages first. This should give you a good baseline on how accurate the voice mail transcription is in Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging. Also, keep in mind that this is still beta software. Expect improved accuracy when Exchange 2010 is released to manufacturing (RTM).
If this is a must have feature for your organization, plan on having beefy server hardware for your Unified Messaging servers. Unfortunately, hardware requirements have not been finalized yet. We’ll update this blog when Microsoft makes that announcement.
For assistance with Unified Communications (UC) planning, deployment, and telephone integration, check out some of our services:
Tags: Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft, Speech-to-Text, UM, Unified Messaging, Voice Mail, Voice Mail Preview
