|
Contents:
The VoiceXML Approach
Most
people are familiar with automated telephone services.
These services allow users to retrieve information
such as bank balances, flight schedules, and movie
show times from any telephone. The explosive growth
of the Internet and World Wide Web technologies
has shifted the landscape for providers of traditional
phone services to a new set of customers accessing
information and services through the Web. While
in most cases customers still access automated
services through the phone, providers are finding
it easier to build new services that exploit the
power of Web technology.
VoiceXML
provides the best of both worlds. Providers, by
expressing automated voice services using a markup
language like VoiceXML, can open up their new
Web services to customers using voice interfaces,
such as the telephone. Developers can build automated
voice services using exactly the same technology
they use to create visual Web sites, significantly
reducing the cost of construction and delivery
of new capabilities for the traditional phone
customer.
History
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.
Advantages
of Voice Markup Content
Content providers today are faced with a dilemma:
should they provide services only on the World
Wide Web, or should they also provide telephone
access to their applications? Today, there are
significant hardware and integration costs involved
in deploying a telephone service. Typically, a
provider would need to purchase telephony hardware,
develop an application in a proprietary application
programming interface, and integrate the application
with existing databases. With voice markup, a
content provider could develop a voice application
using many of the same Web-development tools its
programmers already are familiar with, publish
the application on an existing Web server, and
arrange with a service provider to handle VoiceXML
interpretation. Because established Web technologies
are used, the integration with back-end databases
can be shared with the HTML application. Because
the development of the application is separated
from its deployment, the content provider will
have much more flexibility in deploying the application.
For example, one option would be to contract with
a service provider until the voice application
had proven its worth, and later purchase a VoiceXML
platform to own and operate.
Consumers also can realize many advantages from
a standardized voice markup language. First, the
ease of deploying new voice applications with
the markup approach promises to expand the range
of applications accessible from the telephone.
Furthermore, once a large number of services are
available via the Internet, it becomes possible
to interact with several unrelated services during
a single phone call. In essence, individual consumers
could have "Voice ISP" service in addition
to, or included in, their traditional data ISP
services.
Combining
for the Future
Leveraging the best aspects of AT&T and Lucent
phone markup languages and Motorola's VoxML technology,
together with the VoiceXML Forum's large collection
of supporters and contributors, is expected to
yield an open, broadly applicable voice markup
language standard for all to use.
The end result will have the telephony features
needed to build sophisticated interactive voice
services for business applications, such as call
centers, as well as all of the functions needed
to provide speech-driven interfaces to all manner
of end users. VoiceXML will help deliver voice
services from the high-mobility worker on a cellular
phone calling the company intranet to get information
on a sales prospect to mom calling to get a weather
report before sending the kids out for the day.
VoiceXML will include conventional telephony input,
output and call control features, including: touch-tone
input, automatic speech recognition support, audio
recording (e.g., for voice mail), the ability
to play recordings (such as WAV files), speech
synthesis from plain or annotated text, call transfer,
conferencing, and other advanced call management
features. As an XML-based definition with an HTML-like
appearance, VoiceXML will be easy to learn for
experienced Web content programmers and amenable
to easy processing by tools to support desktop
development of VoiceXML Web applications.
Applications
AT&T, Lucent, and Motorola have built applications
illustrating the strengths of the VoiceXML approach,
based on their previous work.
AT&T and its business customers have built
several examples of typical automated business
applications: customer surveys, telephone e-commerce
services, product promotion, recipe browsing and
delivery, frequently asked question services.
AT&T has also built a full consumer telephone
service based on its work, which included contributions
from business partners for weather, news, and
stock market data. AT&T has also constructed
many other prototype consumer services such as
prepaid calling card and universal messaging.
Lucent has demonstrated the use of the markup
language approach to create banking and other
e-commerce services, a variety of information
retrieval services, and interactive communications
services.
Motorola demonstrated a collection of mobile-productivity
applications at its VoxML announcement from three
early adopters of the technology: BizTravel.com,
CBS Marketwatch, and The Weather Channel. Other
active areas of application development include
e-commerce, consumer self-service, local events
information, and corporate intranet information
access.
Back
to Top
Back
to Press Kit
Copyright
© 2000 - 2004 VoiceXML Forum. All
rights reserved.
The VoiceXML Forum is a program of the
IEEE
Industry Standards and Technology Organization
(IEEE-ISTO)
For a additional information/questions, contact
voicexml-admin@voicexml.org
This site is maintained by the VoiceXML Forum Webmaster
|
