Garr said IBM recently won a new customer, German voice systems integrator dtms Solutions, as a customer. The company had previously used technology from market leader Nuance Communications Inc. Nuance merged with ScanSoft Inc. in October. At the time, the combined firm held about three-quarters of the speech recognition market, according to Gartner Group.

Garr declined to reveal Voice Server's exact sales, saying only that it has sold "thousands of ports." He said that the speech recognition market has grown slower than expected, but that adoption of Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP) as well as Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) should help spur demand.

One area where IBM appears to be lagging is in support for the VoiceXML 2.0 format, a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard supported by several companies. including Nuance, Avaya Inc. and Nortel.

According to Ken Rehor, a Palo Alto, Calif. telecommunications consultant who also chairs the VoiceXML Forum, the group has now certified a total of 18 platforms and services as compliant with VoiceXML 2.0.

Microsoft, a growing player in speech technology, is readying its own Speech Server 2007, which will support VoiceXML 2.0.