IBM Extreme Blue Interns Author Multimodal Applications in XHTML+Voice

By Anne Johnson and Calista Fredericksen

Extreme Blue is IBM’s premier internship program for technical and business interns. Each year, IBM sifts through thousands of talented candidates to hand over coveted spots in a program that is the epitome of an internal incubator for bleeding edge technology.

This past summer, a couple of us in the Extreme Blue program had the opportunity to explore the capabilities that lie at the intersection of telephony and computing. We worked with Igor Jablokov, who is IBM’s Program Director for Multimodal and Voice Products and also serves on the VoiceXML Forum board. One of the core things he helped us understand was the importance of open standards in delivering complex solutions to the marketplace. One project involved voice-enabling Web applications for highly mobile individuals—sparing many road warriors the agony of thumb fatigue from their Blackberries. These Web applications were developed using the open standards-based XHTML+Voice (X+V) markup language. The goal was to improve personal efficiency in transportation (parking spot availability, public transit estimated arrival times) and personal information management (aggregation of email, RSS feeds, and streaming radio). Each of these Web applications provided voice interaction as well as touch screen and keypad input, a capability known as multimodal. Integrating these additional modes of interaction within the Web browser and device centric applications on smartphones helps end wasted time, frustration and last minute panic attacks for everyday activities.

IBM’s leadership in multimodal technologies ranges from multiplatform runtimes to an open toolkit based on Eclipse, allowing developers to reuse existing Web development skills. Combined with advances in multimode phones that are now capable of seamless transitions between WiFi and cellular networks, makes instant connectivity to valued resources possible as well as reduces the number of phones and handhelds needed.

A second Extreme Blue team took on the challenge of interoperability between computers and telephones. They built a new platform to make it easy for developers to add telephone functionality to business applications using Web services based on SOA. Adding telephony makes the following applications possible: 1) a calendar that automatically calls its end user into a conference call 2) a computer calling its supply shop to order a part for itself 3) a consumer calling their oven to see if it has been left on.  

With this new IBM telephony middleware platform, computers and inanimate objects can be easily telephony-enabled. This means an exponential increase in the number of potential end users of VoiceXML-based applications. The development of multichannel solutions will be brought to the masses of computer programmers and their creativity will bring a future where telephones and computers are combined in innovative and revolutionary ways.  Future communication applications will run on an IBM standard platform

Anne Johnson is an MBA candidate at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. She can be reached at annejohnson@sloan.mit.edu.

Calista Fredericksen is an MBA candidate at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. She can be reached at calista@umich.edu.