PISCATAWAY, N.J., May 22, 2000 — The VoiceXML Forum today announced that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has acknowledged the submission of Version 1.0 of the VoiceXML specification. At its May 10-12 meetings in Paris, the W3C’s Voice Browser Working Group agreed to adopt VoiceXML 1.0 as the basis for the development of a W3C dialog markup language.

The Forum’s founding members, AT&T, IBM, Lucent Technologies, and Motorola made the W3C submission. Acknowledgement by the W3C will help to accelerate and expand the reach of the Internet through voice-enabled Web content and services. The VoiceXML Forum will host the next meeting of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group in September 2000.

"As the W3C Voice Browser Working Group begins to define the speech interface framework that extends the Web to voice-based devices, we will use VoiceXML as a model for our dialog markup language. 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 the Intel Architecture Labs, who is Co-chair of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group.

The VoiceXML 1.0 specification is based on years of research and development at AT&T, IBM, Lucent Technologies and Motorola, as well as on comments from VoiceXML Forum supporters. Since the release of VoiceXML 1.0 in March 2000, the Forum has nearly doubled its supporter membership to more than 150 companies.

Based on the World Wide Web Consortium’s industry-standard Extensible Markup Language (XML), Version 1.0 of the VoiceXML specification provides a high-level programming interface to speech and telephony resources for application developers, service providers and equipment manufacturers. Standardization of VoiceXML will:

  • Simplify creation and delivery of Web-based, personalized interactive voice-response services;
  • Enable phone and voice access to integrated call center databases, information and services on Web sites, and company intranets; and
  • Help enable new voice-capable devices and appliances.

The VoiceXML Forum will continue its activities to support and promote VoiceXML as a standard method for providing voice access to Internet content and services.

Members of the Forum will be participating in the Speech Technology & Applications Expo 2000 in San Jose on May 22-24. The first day of the Expo will conclude with a VoiceXML Tutorial. VoiceXML will also be the focus of at least five other presentations given during the three-day conference.

The VoiceXML Forum is open to any company interested in making Internet information and content accessible by voice and phone. For further information, please contact Cindy Tiritilli, VoiceXML Forum Program Administrator at +1-732-465-6464 or ctiritilli@voicexml.org.

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