The promise of a voice-enabled Web

Many computing professionals have heard of XML, and some use it to describe text, images and other data with rich structure. The author discusses an innovative use of XML, called VoiceXML, to support human-computer dialogs via spoken input and audio output. VoiceXML defines dialogs between humans and machines in terms of audio files to be played, text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition capabilities, and touch-tone input. The author reviews the existing architectures for World Wide Web and telephone services, describes how VoiceXML enables consolidation of service logic for Web and phone, and summarizes the features of the VoiceXML 1.0 specification. Implementation of VoiceXML clients and VoiceXML services has begun in many of the VoiceXML Forum's member companies and will soon be available in the marketplace. The World Wide Web Voice Browser working group has adopted VoiceXML 1.0 as the basis for the dialog markup language that is part of its speech user interface framework.