Extending the Web to voice-based devices reached a milestone Monday when the World Wide Web Consortium accepted version 1.0 of the Voice Extensible Markup Language specification.
Based on the W3C's industry-standard XML, the VoiceXML 1.0 specification provides an intelligent API to speech and telephony applications for developers, service providers and equipment manufacturers.
The W3C's acceptance of VoiceXML 1.0 will accelerate and expand the reach of the Internet by "voice enabling" Web content and services, VoiceXML Forum officials said.
According to forum officials, standardisation of VoiceXML will simplify the creation of personalised interactive voice-response services on the Web; allow voice and phone access to information and services on Web sites, call center databases and company intranets; and produce new voice-access devices.
VoiceXML 1.0 is based on years of research and development at AT&T, IBM, Lucent Technologies and Motorola along with comments from VoiceXML Forum supporters. Since the release of VoiceXML 1.0 in March, the forum has nearly doubled its membership to more than 150 companies.
Earlier this month, the W3C's Voice Browser Working Group agreed to adopt VoiceXML 1.0 as the basis for developing a W3C dialog markup language. The VoiceXML Forum will host the next meeting of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group in September.
"The W3C speech interface framework will include integrated markup languages for dialog, grammar, speech synthesis, natural language semantics and multimodal dialogs as well as a standard list of reusable dialogs," said Jim Larson of Intel Architecture Labs, co-chair of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group, in a statement.
The VoiceXML Forum is open to any company interested in making Internet information and content accessible by voice and phone.
More information is available from VoiceXML Forum Program Administrator Cindy Tiritilli at ctiritilli@voicexml.org.
