VoiceXML Review - Letter from the Editor

Volume 3, Issue 5 - September/October 2003

September 2003

Dear Readers,

The amount of activity surrounding VoiceXML in the industry continues to burgeon. Along with the many press releases VoiceXML Forum member companies issued in conjunction with the recent SpeechTek gathering in New York, the VoiceXML Forum made two significant announcements of its own. Representatives from industry notables Hewlett-Packard, Nuance, VoiceGenie Technologies, and West Corporation have joined founders AT&T, IBM, Lucent and Motorola on the Forum’s Board of Directors. In addition, the Forum announced the launch of its VoiceXML Platform Certification Program. Both of these announcements mark major milestones for the VoiceXML Forum, and for the industry in general.

As I write this note, the W3C Voice Browser Working Group and the Multimodal Interaction Group are assembled in Budapest, Hungary. These groups will spend the week discussing future versions of VoiceXML, as well as VoiceXML’s role in emerging multimodal standards. The aim of this month’s VoiceXML Review is to help readers develop a better understanding of the XHTML+Voice specification for writing multimodal dialogs as well as the tools that are available today for authoring XHTML+Voice content.

Richard Miranti and his colleague’s at IBM’s Pervasive Computing Division provide us with a detailed walk through the anatomy of an XHTML+Voice document in their feature article entitled “Developing Multimodal Applications using XHTML+Voice”. The article is essentially a discussion of the sample pizza-ordering application that is delivered with the IBM Multimodal toolkit. If you’re new to XHTML+Voice and want to get a quick snapshot of how XHTML and VoiceXML are combined in a clean and intuitive manner to express multimodal dialogues, this is a good read.

IBM has also been active in integrating support for XHTML+Voice in their popular WebSphere Studio development product. Andrea Rutherfoord and colleagues (also of IBM’s Pervasive Computing Division) provide an overview of how Websphere Studio can be used to create X+V multimodal applications. The Multimodal Toolkit (a free download!) an extension to WebSphere Studio provides an integrated development environment for XHTML+Voice content authoring. The toolkit includes other goodies such as a multimodal-enabled version of the Opera browser (coupled with IBM speech resources) and a reusable dialog wizard.

Have you thought all along that schema validation referred to some kind of psychotherapy, and DTD was a fraternity acronym for those who can’t remember the Greek characters? If so, your VoiceXML content is probably not conforming to the specification. With the recent launch of the Forum’s platform certification program, and platform vendors already announcing their intention to obtain certification, you can expect an increased emphasis on writing conforming VoiceXML content. In the Q&A department this month, Matt Oshry’s Speak and Listen column sorts out the differences between DTD’s and XML Schemas, their role in validating XML markup, and the many tools available to developers to take advantage of these technologies.

Rob Marchand continues to test our knowledge on VoiceXML events in First Words. I should warn those of you who are just beginning to cut your VoiceXML teeth – Rob is dealing with subtleties here that you may not appreciate when stammering your first VoiceXML “Hello World”. Nevertheless, it’s good to be reminded that things don’t always work the way you might expect. That simple fact is what keeps your customers salivating for the next version, and you gainfully employed!

Sincerely,

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

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