Answers
to Your Questions About VoiceXML
(Continued
from Part 1)
Q:
How is internationalization addressed in VoiceXML?
A: The
VoiceXML 1.0 specification is an application of XML
1.0 and therefore supports the universal character set
standard known as Unicode. In theory this allows markup
text associated with grammars and synthesized speech
to be coded for most spoken languages.
Moving
forward, future versions of the language are expected
to support the 'xml:lang' attribute of the XML core
standard for the <vxml> tag, as well as for input/output
tags such as <grammar> and <prompt>. In
addition VoiceXML 2.0 implementations will be expected
to conform to the W3C
Speech Synthesis Markup Language and the XML form
of the W3C
Speech Recognition Grammar Format, both of which
utilize the 'xml:lang' attribute.
The
xml:lang attribute can be assigned string values according
to the three schemes defined in RFC
1766. These schemes include either a combination
of the language and country codes defined by the ISO
639 and ISO 3166 standards, IANA-defined registrations,
or user-defined codes. To put it simply, this attribute
informs the interpreter of which language the data associated
with the tag is written in. Whether or not the underlying
platform supports the languages VoiceXML applications
specify is implementation dependent.
In
terms of additional support for developing internationalized
application, one should keep in mind that VoiceXML markup
is typically generated by server side applications.
The same internationalization/localization facilities
developers have at their disposal in their web server
development environment (resource bundles, etc.) can
also be utilized when generating VoiceXML markup.
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© 2001 VoiceXML Forum. All rights reserved.
The VoiceXML Forum is a program of the
IEEE
Industry Standards and Technology Organization (IEEE-ISTO).
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