Community Radio Stations use publicVoiceXML

By Roland Alton-Scheidl

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Inside publicVoiceXML

PublicVoiceXML is designed to be used by SMEs, and it works nicely on low cost telephony hardware. The protocol handling is making use of ISDN-CAPI, which works fine e.g. with the ISDN B1 active card from AVM. Analog lines are currently not supported, as too many country/telco specific cases for DDI or disconnect handling would need to be taken into account. The VoiceXML browser is written in C++ and is well-commented with explainations of each function, as well as nice logging features.

PublicVoiceXML supports all "must-have" tags of the VoiceXML 2.0 specs, however we have not yet implemented speech recognition. A list of tags supported can be found here http://www.publicVoiceXML.org/PVX-Tag-Schedule.htm . A pre-release running on Windows platforms has been published on SourceForge in December 2002 (https://sourceforge.net/projects/publicvoicexml/). The beta version for Linux will be available end of 1Qu03, which we are stress testing now together with affiliated radio stations. The consortium has decided to perform the W3C implementation report (http://www.w3.org/Voice/2003/ir/voicexml20-ir.html) and will use the results as a feedback for further developments.

Most of the trial applications were built on a basic framework developed within the project. This framework uses PHP as a middleware, Postgres database (through PEAR database abstraction layer), and Smarty template engine for the generation of HTML and VoiceXML pages. This results in clean PHP code, and the separation of presentation from business logic. HTML templates can be edited by designers without the need for programming skills, and VoiceXML scripts can be fine-tuned without touching PHP code.

Demonstrations at community radio stations

InterviewBox

At the biggest European fair for Research on Information Society Technologies, the IST-2002-Event, November 4 Ð 6, 2002 in Copenhagen, Team Teichenberg and Public Voice Lab were running the official Event Radio at the exhibition. Together with Damian Payton from BBC the consortium delegation from Vienna made interviews at many presentation stands by using the PublicVoiceXML interview box. This application creates wav-files out of recorded telephone-conversations. The collected audio-content with astonishing good quality is accessible via a web interface, ready for downloading and further use like adding to a playlist passed on to a stream (http://teichenberg.at/eutist-ami/). With a refined and tuned version of the InterviewBox, Radio Orange 94.0, Public Voice Lab and Team Teichenberg managed the reporting on the general elections in Austria on November 24, 2002. At the former election events the production of reports was much more complicated because of manual coordination of live in-bound telephone interviews taking place at different locations. This time every interviewer-team was assigned to one specific phone number to call to in order to record to an associated InterviewBox. Based on that the producers and editors in the radio studio could easily handle the load of audio-material by pre-listening to the finished interviews and creating playlists for the on-air-programme. Via an official website, other community radio stations in Austria were able to download the recorded files and to integrate them into their reports on the general election. (http://nrw.pvl.at, use account guest/guest)

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