Date: Apr. 24, 2001
Link: http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/vxml/
Source Author or Organization: Eve Andersson, ArsDigita Systems Journal

The author makes a case for an imminent increase in innovation from individual developers, fueled by a new freedom from many interface responsibilities, which are now handled by browsers. Illustrating a future where Web services are rapidly developed by small teams or individuals, the article explores what a single coder can do right now with Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML).

In the past, developing voice applications involved rented or leased lines, text-to-speech conversion software (TTS), and commercial voice recognition software. Today, VoiceXML coders can employ free VoiceXML gateways, such as VoiceGenie and Tellme, to speak the pages they are developing.

The article explains how to build some voice VoiceXML applications, and then moves through two development case studies that include showing the user how to sign up for a free Tellme developer account and check code by hearing it spoken. The article also covers how to take advantage of the VoiceXML grammar reference, code library and library of reusable grammars, and also provides some workarounds for some common pronunciation glitches.

In the concluding discussion of future directions for VoiceXML, a number is given for a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Computer Science server that the reader may call to experience a more advanced conversational system.