VoiceXML for Web-based distributed conversational applications

Development of speech services has been hindered by a lack of easy-to-use standard tools for managing the dialogue between user and service. Interactive voice-response systems are characterized by expensive, closed application-development environments. Lack of tools inhibits portability of applications and limits the availability of skilled application developers. Consequently, voice applications are costly to develop and deploy, so voice access is limited to only those services for which the business case is most compelling for voice access. Here, I offer an introduction to VoiceXML, an emerging standard XML-based markup language for distributed Web-based voice services, much as HTML is a language for distributed visual services. VoiceXML brings the power of Web development Bruce Lucas