VoiceXML Review - Letter from the Editor

Volume 4, Issue 4 - November / December 2004

December 2004

Dear Readers,

As we look back over the past year, it is remarkable to note the tremendous progress VoiceXML has made in the industry. On the standards front, the VoiceXML 2.0 specification and its companion specs SRGS, and SSML have all been published as recommendations by the World Wide Web Consortium during 2004. The CCXML and SISR specifications are expected to follow suit in the near future. The VoiceXML Forum launched both a platform certification program, as well as a developer certification program. VoiceXML has matured significantly within the past twelve months, and is now a key enabler in thousands of products and services around the world.

The recent series of VoiceXML Forum sponsored webinars have proved to be quite popular with our membership. If you haven’t been able to attend any of these presentations, you’ll find audio archives and viewgraphs on demand via the Forum’s website. For those of you studying up over the holidays for the developer certification exam, be sure to take a look at Jim Larson’s recent webinar for hints on how to prepare.

Our last issue of the VoiceXML Review in 2004 features an article by David Pearce (Motorola) on distributed speech recognition (DSR). David provides us with a gentle overview of the technology and sketches out the important it will play in delivering speech and multimodal services to mobile devices.

Our second feature article is authored by Christopher Harrick and Benjamin Lewis who recently completed internships in IBM’s Extreme Blue program. Imagine the joy of spending an entire summer with a team of brilliant and creative students using VoiceXML and XHTML+Voice to voice-enable IBM’s Deep Blue chess champ, and Lotus Notes!

Both of our regular columnists Rob Marchand (VoiceGenie) and Matt Oshry (Tellme) bring us some hands-on examples that put the new VoiceXML 2.1 features to good use. In First Words, Rob provides a detailed walk through of the new utterance recording features in 2.1. Matt Oshry utilizes the new <data> element and other techniques to show how gaps in your pre-recorded audio samples can be dealt with, providing for a nice seamless experience for the end user.

Finally, do take a moment to respond to the VoiceXML Forum’s training survey, and let us know how we can better serve your organization’s needs in this area.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Engelsma
Editor-in-Chief
VoiceXML Review

back to the top