Even in the current economic climate, the market for Computer Telephony (CT) and speech applications is growing, as organizations are looking for ways to lower costs, improve customer service and optimize operational efficiency. Speech applications, in particular, are finding increased market acceptance. After several years of technological progress and decreasing cost, TTS (Text-to-Speech) and ASR (Advanced Speech Recognition) technologies have reached a point where their widespread deployment becomes increasingly feasible. Together, they are enabling new application types and make existing telephony applications even more user friendly. And although ‘traditional’ DTMF (i.e. touchtone) applications are often overlooked, they too represent a significant and growing market, as many solutions can effectively be implemented without the expense of speech. In total, the Voice Business marketplace is forecast to grow from an estimated US $632m in 2001 to $4.3bn in 2007, representing a healthy compound annual growth rate of 38% (Source: Datamonitor). For developers, this opens a wide range of attractive, high value opportunities, such as IVRs, call center solutions, outbound dialing and survey applications, voice portals and others. Developers looking to enter the voice business market face a number of hardware and software choices. Chief among these decisions is the choice of development environment – it can determine success or failure of a development initiative and make the difference between a profitable project rollout and a costly failure. This document highlights some of the critical issues that should be considered.