VoiceXML Review - Letter from the Editor

Volume 4, Issue 1 - January/February 2004

February 2004

Dear Readers,

On behalf of the VoiceXML Forum’s Publication Board, I wish you all the very best in 2004! Last year ended with a bang for us VoiceXMLians, when on December 18, the incredibly industrious W3C Voice Browser Working Group published the Proposed Recommendation for SRGS along with the Candidate Recommendation for SSML. The momentum continues with the W3C’s announcement of the VoiceXML 2.0 Proposed Recommendation earlier this month. The VoiceXML 2.0 specification is only one small step away from becoming a W3C recommendation.

We are pleased to introduce the January/February issue of the Forum’s VoiceXML Review. As usual, this particular issue is packed with interesting articles, ranging from fascinating anecdotal tales from the trenches, to razor sharp technical tutorials. If you’re involved in VoiceXML, voicexmlreview.org is one online resource that you’ll want to bookmark and visit regularly!

Would you buy a car without headlights? Daniel Enthoven, Director of Marketing at BeVocal makes an excellent observation in his article “VoiceXML on Auto Row”. Daniel suggests that investing in a voice solution that doesn’t include VoiceXML is about as ludicrous as trying to buy a car without headlights. Not only are headlights quite useful to drivers, but it’s actually rather difficult to find a car these days that doesn’t come with them! That is, it’s simply not enough for vendors to clamor that their platform supports VoiceXML – what voice platform vendor (at least in North America) today doesn’t offer VoiceXML as a core feature? Having made this point, Daniel moves on and presents when and how VoiceXML solutions are advantageous in terms of cost savings, ease of maintenance, etc.

Over the holidays, many of you may have noticed the clever application (www.talktosantaclaus.com) the folks at Elix, Nü Echo and Concept S2i put together. In addition to creating a very brilliant way to showcase the power of VoiceXML technology, the teams that put this app together had to clear a number of formidable technical hurdles. Imagine writing a multi-lingual application that not only manages to hold the attention of 3-9 year old children, but also recognizes their speech, and pronounces the names of the latest toys correctly. Oh yeah, and by the way, you only have a month to do all this! In this issue of the VoiceXML Review, Joanne Holland (Elix) and Yves Normandin (Nü Echo) bring us the fascinating inside story behind this very successful (almost 11% of Quebec’s population aged 3-9 called the app!) VoiceXML application.

This month, our First Words columnist Rob Marchand (VoiceGenie) covers legacy VoiceXML 1.0 meta tags as well as the more contemporary metadata tags, RDF and Dublin Core metadata properties. Rob provides a short tutorial on how to incorporate metadata in VoiceXML documents, and also establishes the benefits of their use in terms of indexing and manipulating documents.

Our Speak & Listen columnist Matt Oshry (Tellme Networks) discusses techniques for writing robust VoiceXML applications, even in the face of unexpected failures. In addition to addressing the general problem of handling unexpected failures, Matt discusses how to handle failures in the context of VoiceXML subdialogs. If you have a VoiceXML-related question you’d like Matt to tackle in a future column, you can submit it online or send Matt an .

In closing, I’d like to bring your attention to the new 2004 Editorial Calendar. If you are interested in publishing your work in the VoiceXML Review, please take a look at the list of topics that will be addressed in 2004, and follow the instructions provided in the Author Kit to submit your article. If you have a topic that doesn’t fit in any of the scheduled topics, we still would like to hear from you – feel free to drop me a line: .

Sincerely,

Jonathan Engelsma
Editor-in-Chief
VoiceXML Review

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