Dear Readers,

Its finally Spring here! For those of us who live in a colder clime, this is a really big deal! While we've had our share of April showers, we are also getting an early sneak preview of those May flowers! Our feature article this month is on the W3C Natural Language Semantics Markup Language by Deborah A. Dahl. Having served as the editor of the original specification when it was developed by the W3C Voice Browser Working Group, and now serving as chair of the newly formed W3C Multimodal Working Group, Deborah is well-positioned to introduce our readers to NLSML and provide insight into its usage moving forward. While NLSML is not widely used in current VoiceXML interpreter implementations, its usage will become more critical in future multimodal interpreters that will have to manage input responses from modalities in addition to speech.

Our second feature this month is VoiceXML: A Publishing Standard for Accessibility by Brian Ty Graham. In the article, Brian details the emergence of VoiceXML as an open and widely supported standard induced a paradigm shift in the voice application and IVR market by empowering web developers to write voice applications efficiently. VoiceXML is having a profound effect on not only IVR and traditional-telephony applications but also on extending the enterprise and consumer applications to be accessed by voice.

On behalf of the Forum's Publication Board I'd like to welcome Matt Oshry to the e-zine. Matt is replacing Jeff Kunins as our regular Speak & Listen columnist moving forward. Like Jeff, Matt hails from Tellme Networks and lives and breathes VoiceXML technologies. At the same time, we wish to thank Jeff for the many excellent columns he has contributed to the e-zine in the past. We need not say goodbye however, as I've already gotten Jeff to commit to writing a feature article for us now and then in the future! Also be sure to visit Rob Marchand's always-impressive First Words column. This month Rob shows us N-best recognition results.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Engelsma
Editor-in-Chief, VoiceXML Review
Jonathan.Engelsma@voicexmlreview.org

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