June 2005

Dear Readers,

In addition to the recent flurry of VoiceXML platform certification activity here at the VoiceXML Forum, another sign of VoiceXML’s maturation in the industry is the quantity and quality of developer tool offerings that are rapidly becoming available. One interesting development to note in this category is the Eclipse Voice Tools Project. As you are probably already aware, Eclipse is the phenomenally popular open source integrated development environment framework that makes programming (of all flavors) even more addictive for folks that write code for a living. The Eclipse Voice Tools Project is all about introducing VoiceXML to the Eclipse platform. In this month’s issue of the VoiceXML Review, Andrew Wahbe (VoiceGenie) and Brent Metz (IBM) bring us an overview of the project and what to expect in the future.

On a completely different topic, there has been a fair amount of interest brewing within the VoiceXML Forum lately on speaker authentication technology and how it applies to VoiceXML-based systems. Judith Markowitz (J. Markowitz, Consultants) and Ken Rehor (Vocalocity) have put together an article that introduces speaker authentication and related technologies and explores the broader standards question.

On the W3C front, the VoiceXML 2.1 specification has recently graduated to Candidate Recommendation status. Rob Marchand (VoiceGenie), our regular First Words columnist continues his series of articles on the VoiceXML 2.1 specification this month, with a focus on the <transfer> element.

In addition, in this issue, Brad Porter (Tellme Networks) takes up your questions in our regular Speak and Listen column on Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX – the stuff Google Mail and Google Maps uses) and its applicability to VoiceXML, as well as the mysterious access-control header you may have seen used with the new VoiceXML 2.1 <data> element.

We encourage readers to submit their challenging VoiceXML-related questions to our Speak and Listen columnists by emailing speak.and.listen@voicexmlreview.org. Please understand we cannot guarantee when (and if) your questions will be answered in print. If you’re feeling impatient, its quite likely you’ll find answers to your more mundane questions quite quickly on the VoiceXML Forum’s message board.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Engelsma
Editor-in-Chief
VoiceXML Review

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