|
March 2003
Dear
Readers,
A colleague just reminded us that it was 4 years ago
yesterday (March 2, 1999), that AT&T, Lucent and
Motorola announced the creation of the VoiceXML Forum.
(IBM joined as a founding member shortly thereafter.)
It's hard to imagine that four years have gone by so
quickly! Yet, at the same time, when we survey how far
things have come along since the Spring of 1999, then
it seems like a long time! At that time, VoxML was in
its infancy, and the 0.9 VoiceXML specification didn't
appear until months later. Now in 2003, the VoiceXML
2.0 specification is a W3C candidate recommendation,
and there are literally hundreds of companies offering
VoiceXML-related products and services! If you are interested
in the history of VoiceXML, you might want to take a
look at the recently updated introduction to the tutorials
on www.voicexml.org, written by Jim Ferrans.
The VoiceXML Forum intends to celebrate the arrival
of Spring with its annual Spring Users Group Meeting,
being held in conjunction with AVIOS / Speech TEK Expo
2003. The meeting will be held on Thursday, April 3
at the Fairmont in San Jose, California. The meeting
will feature both a business and a technical track,
so there is something there for everybody. We have assembled
an excellent program of speakers, who will be debating
and presenting topics ranging from Open Standards IVR
- The CPE vs. ASP Debate to VoiceXML's future role in
X+V (multimodal!) Also featured will be a variety of
live demonstrations, including commercially deployed
VoiceXML applications, as well as cutting edge X+V multimodal
tools and applications. In addition, key members of
the W3C Voice Browser working group will be present
to provide an overview of what's going on within the
standards area. You simply can't afford to miss this
event. Be sure to select the VoiceXML User Group Meeting
option when registering for AVIOS.
This issue of the VoiceXML review is rather special,
in that we are going pause and take a close look at
a variety of non-commercial VoiceXML projects that have
sprouted up on various parts of the globe. Some of these
projects are open source, while others are open binary.
All of them demonstrate the advantages of using VoiceXML
in solving real-world problems. They also confirm the
fact that it's possible with a small group of bright
people to build and deploy a real VoiceXML platform
without requiring huge budgets and armies of programmers.
Pavel Cenek, previously with the University, Brno, in
Czech Republic and now with the Norwegian applied research
institute Norut IT, brings us up-to-date with his project:
Elvira. Elvira is a flexible and extensible implementation
of VoiceXML that Pavel and his colleagues have put together
for their research in human language technologies. Elvira's
component-based architecture has made it particularly
useful in extending VoiceXML to handle statistic gathering,
dialogue strategy evaluation, and exploring multimodal
interfaces.
This month, our faithful First Words columnist Rob Marchand
takes us through the handling of complex recognition
results in VoiceXML. However, true to his column's moniker,
Rob manages to make sense of these rather recent changes/additions
to the 2.0 specifications without getting you lost in
the forest. By the way, Rob happens to be the e-zine's
longest standing columnist. If you are just getting
started in VoiceXML, I'd encourage you to go back through
the archives and work your way through the articles
Rob has penned over the past couple of years. Rob's
columns build quite nicely upon each other and it makes
for an excellent tutorial.
The
PublicVoiceXML project, recently referred to as the
"jBoss of the VoiceXML World" by one observer,
is an open source VoiceXML implementation, funded in
part by the Information Society Technology Program of
the European Commission. Dr. Roland Alton-Scheidl brings
us an overview of this remarkable project (the platform
was used to report the general election results in Austria
last fall!) Of particular interest in this article is
an insightful discussion of the open source concept,
its potential economic impact, and its importance within
the European community. Also noteworthy, is the team's
intent to submit an implementation report to the W3C
based on the recently published Implementation Report
tests.
The
third article we selected for publication in this issue
is the Open VXI open source VoiceXML implementation
offered by SpeechWorks in partnership with Carnegie
Mellon University. This open source VoiceXML project,
as far as we know, has been around the longest, and
is one you've likely heard about. The article, written
by Brian Eberman, gives an excellent architectural overview
and then dives into detail regarding how one goes about
integrating the interpreter into the speech resources
and call control subsystem. Plans are underway to evolve
a new version that implements the current VoiceXML 2.0
candidate recommendation.
In
our First Words column, Rob Marchand polishes off his
ongoing discussion on handling complex recognition results,
showing how a form level grammar can be used to introduce
mixed-initiative dialogues, vs. the more elementary
directed dialogues discussed so far.
We
get a fair share of questions from folks about how you
to do task "X" or "Y" when writing
a VoiceXML application in JSP, ASP, or one of your other
favorite web development paradigms. The simple answer
is of course, that you do it the same way you do it
when generating markup for your favorite HTML browser,
only now you generate VoiceXML markup! Nevertheless,
this month, Matt Oshy tackles one of these standard
"meat and potatoes" web development questions
(i.e. how do I access data from an Access database for
my VoiceXML app?) with vengeance. This seemingly innocent
question was all Matt needed to unleash his arsenal
of finely honed XML skills in a frenzy of creative coding.
From XML to XSLT, to VoiceXML and SRGS, along with a
pinch of JavaScript (or should we say JScript?) - you'll
find it all here!
Sincerely,
Jonathan
Engelsma
Editor-in-Chief
VoiceXML Review
Jonathan.Engelsma@voicexmlreview.org
back
to the top
Copyright
© 2000 - 2004 VoiceXML Forum. All rights reserved.
The VoiceXML Forum is a program of the
IEEE Industry Standards
and Technology Organization (IEEE-ISTO).
|