Deploying speech applications over the web

At Digital Equipment Corporation's Cambridge Research Lab (CRL), the Speech Interaction Group has been focusing on building speech applications for deployment over the World-Wide Web. Web-based speech applications require the browser to capture and transmit speech to remote servers for back-end processing, maintain application state, and present multi-media responses. This paper describes the group's strategy for delivering speech applications built around a mechanism, the digital Voice Plugin, for capturing and transmitting audio from a browser. It describes a conversational application implemented within this framework and discusses the problems of delivering these systems on the Web. In addition, we brie y touch upon some other Web-based speech applications that have been developed at CRL.