Thanks to the cooperation of ScanSoft, customers using Siemens Communications HiPath Xpressions portfolio of remote office solutions can now use speech technologies to more efficiently manage and retrieve voice, e-mail and fax correspondence via a personal computer or telephone.

Siemens on Tuesday announced the availability of HiPath Xpressions Version 4.0, the latest iteration of its real-time enterprise solution that includes a speech recognition command module and other mobility features designed to help workers and on-the-go.

"Siemens is partnering with SpeechWorks as of now," said Rob Arnold, an enterprise telephony analyst with Current Analysis.

With the addition of the speech recognition module, the HiPath Xpressions V4.0 solution helps give mobile workers more access to messaging and organizational tools using voice commands such as hands-free message playback, calendar updating, meeting date acceptance, contact list management and message forwarding. Multilingual support was also enhanced to include 13 telephony user interface (TUI) languages and six text-to-speech languages.

In an email exchange with TMCnet, Arnold explained that while Siemens is enabling HiPath Xpressions V4.0 solution to interoperate on a broad set of enterprise infrastructures with the latest release, that capability could even extend to speech technologies.

"I would also assume in the future they will also be utilizing the speech interface Microsoft is developing for Exchange," Arnold explained.

Siemens said HiPath Xpressions V4.0 solution is now supported by many traditional PBX and IP-PBX network architectures including Siemens and many non-Siemens network infrastructures. The solution is supported by open, session initiation protocol (SIP)-standard network environments.

HiPath Xpressions continues to support enterprises with user-defined call routing options, voice messaging as well as more advanced unified messaging features enabling users to manage their messaging preferences without having to use telephone prompts. Enterprises can mix-and match solutions to meet the specific business demands of various work groups.

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet.Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg.For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.