POSTED BY: KEN CIRCEO, Lead Tech Writer

As the Speech Community continues to grow, so does the need for better channels of communication. To that end, we've created three new public newsgroups to handle different areas of speech:

   Speech Server
   microsoft.public.speech.server
   Description: General issues about Microsoft Speech Server (MSS), a
   development and deployment platform for voice recognition applications.

   Speech Desktop
   microsoft.public.speech.desktop
   Description: General public newsgroup for Microsoft speech and natural
   language technologies that run on the desktop.

   Speech Mobile & Embedded
   microsoft.public.speech.mobile
   Description: General issues about Microsoft speech technologies and
   applications such as VoiceCommand that run on the Windows Mobile
   and Windows CE powered devices.

Feel free to check them out when you have the chance.

New to Newsgroups?
Traditionally, “newsgroup” refers to a discussion that is fed to USENET and accessed with a newsgroup reader such as Outlook Express. USENET is a global collection of servers that exchange articles in a hierarchical set of newsgroups. Conversations between these servers use Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP). Most people access USENET through their Internet Service Provider (ISP). Like all Microsoft Public Newsgroups, the new Speech newsgroups are a part of the USENET hierarchy.

How do you access Microsoft Newsgroups?
There are two ways (that I know of) to access any Microsoft newsgroup: through Outlook Express and through the microsoft.com Web interface.