For starters, I think it's a great step forward to redefine the category in that nuanced way (look, a pun). We at Call Center - and many in the surrounding industries - are too used to putting our technologies into neat little baskets. That may be how telecom tools were developed years ago, but these days, with IT and software and networking pervasive in the fabric of call centers, it's not helpful to think of "speech" as just an IVR application. It's refreshing to see speech defined as a) the application, b) the data that flows through the application and c) the development platform on which the application rests.

Miller writes: "A long-anticipated spike in hardware replacement is about to take place as an echo" of Y2K. "In the voice processing world [that event] gave systems makers the opportunity to refresh their product lines and force an upgrade on loyal clients." And how long is the expected service life and depreciation of said product? Yup: seven years.

The difference between 2007 and 2000, he argues, is that what was once a more simple act of hardware replacement and upgrade is now made more complex by the fact that speech applications and CAT are wrapped in "a services-oriented candy shell with well-understood SOAP-flavored APIs."

Miller also points out that we're experiencing a boomlet of development tools. "Both professionals and IT staff are availing themselves of some of the most sophisticated resources ever available to support rapid development of speech-enabled services." He points to Microsoft, Avaya, Vicorp, Genesys and Cisco as signposts.

The report goes on to discuss some of the trends in that development environment, and closes with a section that relates all these trends into the call center environment. Much of what he says in that section is speculative (and to my mind, a bit more visionary than contact center pros generally respond to), but interesting nonetheless. It's one of those reports that'll be interesting to return to in three or four years to see how close to the mark he was. I recommend reading it, it's insightful and thought-provoking.