VoiceXML

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VoiceXML has its roots in a research project called PhoneWeb at AT&T Bell Laboratories. After the AT&T/Lucent split, both companies pursued development of independent versions of a phone markup language.

Lucent's Bell Labs continued work on the project, now known as TelePortal. The recent research focus has been on service creation and natural language applications.

AT&T Labs has built a mature phone markup language and platform that have been used to construct many different types of applications, ranging from call center-style services to consumer telephone services that use a visual Web site for customers to configure and administer their telephone features. AT&T's intent has been twofold. First, it wanted to forge a new way for its business clients to construct call center applications with AT&T-provided network call handling. Second, AT&T wanted a new way to build and quickly deploy advanced consumer telephone services, and in particular define new ways in which third parties could participate in the creation of new consumer services.

Motorola embraced the markup approach as a way to provide mobile users with up-to-the-minute information and interactions. Given the corporate focus on mobile productivity, Motorola's efforts focused on hands-free access. This led to an emphasis on speech recognition rather than touch-tones as an input mechanism. Also, by starting later, Motorola was able to base its language on the recently-developed XML framework. These efforts led to the October 1998 announcement of the VoxML™ technology. Since the announcement, thousands of developers have downloaded the VoxML language specification and software development kit.

There has been growing interest in this general concept of using a markup language to define voice access to Web-based applications. For several years Netphonic has had a product known as Web-on-Call that used an extended HTML and software server to provide telephone access to Web services; in 1998, General Magic acquired Netphonic to support Web access for phone customers. In October 1998, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sponsored a workshop on Voice Browsers. A number of leading companies, including AT&T, IBM, Lucent, Microsoft, Motorola, and Sun, participated.

Some systems, such as Vocalis' SpeecHTML, use a subset of HTML, together with a fixed set of interaction policies, to provide interactive voice services.

Most recently, IBM has announced SpeechML, which provides a markup language for speech interfaces to Web pages; the current version provides a speech interface for desktop PC browsers.

The VoiceXML Forum will explore public domain ideas from existing work in the voice browser arena, and where appropriate include these in its final proposal. As the standardization process for voice browsers develops, the VoiceXML Forum will work with others to find common ground and the right solution for business needs.

 

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