VoiceXML

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The answer to that question is becoming increasingly obvious as some members of the technology community have expressed their displeasure with textual wireless interfaces such as WAP. Wireless communication devices have the disadvantage of having small screens, limited input capabilities, and limited processing power. They've obviously been huge successes as voice communication conduits however it remains to be seen how the public will accept them as data delivery vehicles. One alternative to the textual interface offered by technologies such as WAP is what was originally known as an IVR, or Interactive Voice Response, system. Historically, these systems have been very proprietary and therefore unsuitable for allowing access to Web-based content. VoiceXML basically allows you to define a "tree" that steps the user through a selection process - known as voice dialogs. The user interacts with these voice dialogs through the oldest interface known to mankind: the voice! Powerful speech recognition software resides on the server to convert the user's stated selection (i.e. "Yes" or "No") into textual selection. This process is akin to selecting a hyperlink on a traditional Web page. Dialog selections result in the playback of audio response files (either prerecorded or dynamically generated using some sort of server-side text-to-speech conversion).

From a business viewpoint, voice applications open up a host of new revenue opportunities. Perhaps the most obvious revenue opportunity comes from the increased number of minutes we will all be spending on our wireless phones. In addition, advertising will become as commonplace through these services as it currently is on traditional media (Web, TV, radio, etc.). As voice services are added to your traditional carrier plan, there will clearly be a market for pay-as-you-go premium services (information lookups, email, contact databases, etc.). It's not hard to imagine most consumers opting to listen to a 15-second ad in exchange for free access to these premium services! Because VoiceXML is XML-based, it is yet another technology driving the move towards content distribution and management in XML (see our previous article on this topic). Within two years, it is very likely that content providers will offer both WAP- and Voice-accessible sites for their wireless customers. Clearly, by this point, a manageable architecture using XML will be required.

 

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