Short version: you can’t have non-alphanumeric characters in a user’s display name if you want the user to be reachable by an Exchange AutoAttendant.
Long version:
Today I was configuring an Exchange 2007 UM Auto Attendant for a customer and came across something interesting. The Auto Attendant (AA) had speech recognition enabled, so I should have been able to say "Bob Smith" and have it direct me to Bob’s phone number. Well, my AA worked for everyone except the mythical Bob Smith. All the users were reachable except one. I tried everything: saying the name louder, saying the name more clearly, saying the name in an English accent (yeah, I actually tried it). Nothing worked.
I tried a more technical trick as well: running galgrammargenerator.exe on the UM server, which rebuilds the speech recognition files. This didn’t work either. HOWEVER it did produce a logfile that was useful. In the logfile, I saw it creating a speech rec tag for all the users… except Bob Smith. The galgrammargenerator didn’t like this user name for some reason, and wasn’t adding it to the speech recognition files. So no matter how perfectly I pronounced his name, I wasn’t going to get there.
The speech rec files get created based on two attributes in AD: the display name and (if populated) the phonetic pronunciation field. I looked at the display name for Bob Smith, and it turns out he is Bob Smith Jr. I had read somewhere out there that the UM grammar generator didn’t like special characters, but it was about dial-by-name rather than speech rec. By this time, I was desperate though, so I just removed the period from "Jr.". I re-ran the galgrammargenerator.exe and…. It worked!!
So: no special characters in display names.
