VoiceXML Review - Letter from the Editor

Volume 3, Issue 3 - May/June 2003

May 2003

Dear Readers,

It was good seeing many of you again at the VoiceXML Forum's annual Spring Users Group Meeting held last month in San Jose, California. The viewgraphs from the presentations given at the meeting are now available online in the Members Only area of the VoiceXML Forum's website. The Forum's Education Committee is currently putting together the program for our Fall Users Group Meeting to be held in conjunction with SpeechTek in New York. We are currently conducting an online survey to give you an opportunity to help plan this event. You can take the survey by visiting this url:
http://www.voicexml.org/ugm_survey.asp

Our May/June issue is dedicated to testing VoiceXML applications. We will look at this topic from a variety of perspectives. Given the fact that the VoiceXML 2.0 specification has now become a candidate recommendation within the W3C, platform interoperability and conformance has now become a reality. Within the Forum, conformance has always been on our radar screen, but given the progress of the standard and the recently published implementation report within the W3C, we have seen renewed interest and participation from our member companies. The Conformance Committee, under the leadership of Ken Rehor, has adapted the W3C Voice Browser Working Group's implementation report test suite as a basis for the Forum's Conformance Certification Program. In addition to further evolving and refining the test suite, the Conformance Committee has developed a test harness (available for download by member companies) to help facilitate conformance testing. A detailed update on this effort is provided in this issue of the VoiceXML Review. We highly encourage member companies to download the test suite and tools and actively participate in this process. If you fall into the VoiceXML "platform consumer" category rather than the "platform provider" category, it is still critical that you be plugged into this process and protect your investment by insisting that your platform provider either passes the test suite, or is making progress towards that goal.

In an article entitled "Choosing the Right Test Method", Peter Leppik of VocaLabs surveys a variety of techniques for testing voice applications, including his own firm's unique survey method, utilizing a panel of over 25,000 callers. Peter's article concludes with an insightful matrix comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches to testing voice applications.

In his article entitled "A Case for Improved Dialog Traversal Testing and Analysis", Stuart Harding of CoAssure, Inc. identifies some of the difficulties associated with manual call flow testing and then proceeds to focuses on his firm's automated approach to call flow testing.

Rob Marchand dedicates the First Words column in this issue to the topic of event propagation in VoiceXML. Understanding event propagation in VoiceXML is important in properly handling error conditions that may occur during execution. This article helps understand VoiceXML events as defined by the 2.0 specification. In a future column detailed examples will be provided on how to use this particular feature of the language.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Engelsma
Editor-in-Chief
VoiceXML Review

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