VoiceXML Review - Letter from the Editor

Volume 1, Issue 3 - Mar. 2001

Dear Readers,

It's hard to believe its March already. While this month officially brings us spring, those of us here in the Midwest won't have any high expectations for better weather conditions until at least the end of April! In any case, this March is an exciting month for the VoiceXML community, as it marks the two-year anniversary of the formation of the VoiceXML Forum. It's amazing how quickly the technology has taken hold during these two years. From the four original founding members in 1999, there are now over 420 organizations that have joined the Forum at the various membership levels and are involved in VoiceXML technology in one way or another.

The feature articles in this month's issue of the VoiceXML Review focus on speech technology--the stuff that makes VoiceXML possible. Kimberlee Kemble gets us started with her article entitled An Introduction to Speech Recognition. Kimberlee's article provides a thorough introduction to speech recognition by introducing the basic terminology and concepts, and a broad sketch of how it all works.

Juergen Schroeter brings us up-to-date on the very latest in text-to-speech (TTS) technology in his article
The Fundamentals of Text-to-Speech Synthesis. The article begins with overview of the various methods used traditionally to synthesize intelligible speech from textual input, and then focuses on how more recently the concatenative approach is delivering more natural sounding results. Concatenative TTS systems exploit advances in processing power, information storage and retrieval, and automatic labeling techniques to produce speech that is both intelligible and natural sounding. This article will give you an appreciation for the complexity of modern TTS technology, as well as insight into what the possibilities are moving forward.

As I mentioned last month, the VoiceXML Forum is holding its first annual Users Group Meeting in conjunction with the AVIOS 2001 Conference on April 5, 2001 in San Jose, Calif. If you haven't yet decided whether to attend, read Greg Kohn's feature An Inside Look at the VoiceXML Forum Users Group Meeting for an explanation of why you should attend! In addition, the final agenda and on-line registration instructions have been posted at http://www.voicexml.org/users_group.html.

In this month's Speak & Listen column, Jeff Kunins finally got that batch of questions he's been patiently waiting for you to send him! This month Jeff answers your questions on how to go about evaluating the performance of a VoiceXML interpreter--a critical question if you are looking to deploy a high-density VoiceXML application. Jeff also gives us a few pointers regarding the "multi-modal" question we seem to be hearing more and more about these days. Thanks for sending in your questions last month. If you have additional questions you'd like addressed in this column, send them to speak.and.listen@voicexmlreview.org.

Are you ready to write a real VoiceXML application? In this month's First Words column, Rob Marchand addresses the topic of building large applications in VoiceXML. Rob identifies constructs in the VoiceXML language that facilitate the implementation of large applications. He also gives some excellent guidelines on how to partition application functionality between client and server.

Finally, some of you may not have noticed the "feedback" mailto link on the VoiceXML Review homepage. The members of the VoiceXML Forum's Publication board would really appreciate some feedback on what you think of the new e-zine. Please send your comments along to editor@voicexmlreview.org.

Sincerely,

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

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