VoiceXML Review - Letter from the Editor

Volume 5, Issue 2 - March/April 2005

April 2005

Dear Readers,

Despite a blast of cold snowy weather last weekend, we’re hopeful that spring is finally here to stay! Unlike the weather in Michigan, we can say with certainty that VoiceXML is here to stay. Opera Software dramatically increased the number of VoiceXML deployments around the globe during April, as they experienced over a million downloads of their Opera 8 browser within the first four days after it was released. As many of you are perhaps already aware, each Windows version of Opera 8 is XHTML+Voice enabled by IBM’s Multimodal Runtime and the ViaVoice speech recognizer.

In this issue of the VoiceXML Review Igor Jablokov, Program Director of IBM Software Group’s Multimodal & Voice Portal Initiatives fills us in on the details of the multimodal-enabled Opera browser and discusses the possible use cases in which X+V can be applied.

You might recall the series of introductory articles to CCXML we’ve featured in the past. This month, RJ Auburn, CTO of Voxeo is back again, with an interesting write-up on using CCXML as a SIP Softswitch. On a related note, congratulations are due to the Voxeo team in achieving VoiceXML Forum Platform Certification this month for their VoiceCenter platform!

Rob Marchand (VoiceGenie), our regular First Words columnist continues our tour of the new VoiceXML 2.1 working draft specification. Last month Rob demonstrated how to use the <mark> element to determine how much of a prompt the user has listened to before barging in on it. This month Rob introduces the <foreach> tag, a convenient looping construct added by the new specification.

Finally, if you haven’t yet discovered the VoiceXML Forum Webinars, you might want to keep an eye on http://www.voicexml.org/webinars. The next webinar will feature Peter Leppik, CEO of Vocal Laboratories, Inc on Tuesday, May 3, 2005. Peter’s topic will be on “A Scientific Approach to Better VUI Design”. These webinars are offered free to the first 50 forum members who register. Don’t delay registering, as our past webinars have filled up very quickly!

Sincerely,

Jonathan Engelsma
Editor-in-Chief
VoiceXML Review

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