VoiceXML Platform Certification Program Launched

ChilliNuts writes "The VoiceXML Forum has announced the launch of its VoiceXML Platform Certification Program, in a bid to enforce cross-vendor conformance to VoiceXML 2.0, W3C's XML-based Voice Recognition language. Many Voice Recognition companies have been adopting VoiceXML in the past two years, and this is due to strengthened expectations that it will soon become industry standard. Good news for developers. Plus further proof that Open Standards work! Here's the Press Release"

Comments

Re:This is great.. but

[jone1941]

VoiceXML and CCXML are complimentary open standards. I would guess that it is highly unlikely that you will see these features encorporated into VoiceXML, and sadly CCXML is pretty much a single vendor open standard. What should be done is to add CCXML support to one of the preexisting open source VXML projects that way vendors are encouraged to adopt it as a standard. Unfortunately Oktopus is really not a viable CCXML open source product, but it is a good start.

Re:This is great.. but

[ChilliNuts]

CCXML is pretty much a single vendor open standard

Not true - many companies in the W3C Voice Browser Group have been working on the spec and are due to adopt it. CCXML is currently only a Working Draft, but its tightening up quickly

VOIP

[Deliveranc3]

Don't suppose this is leading to standards in other voice technologies?

Why does voice recognition need standards anyway? It might be nice to have portable devices be able to easily pass it off to a central computer for the really intensive stuff but that doesn't really seem like something they need to collaborate on.

Outside program sends frequencies most useful for voice recognition, home base analyses all frequencies problem solved.

Re:VOIP

[hypnagogue]

Why does voice recognition need standards anyway?

Well, VoiceXML isn't really a voice recognition standard... it's an interactive voice response markup language. It's intended to fill exactly the same role as HTML, but in the telephony space. As such, there is a huge need for a standard... existing web-services infrastructure (and skills) can be used to address IVR problems, but only if there exists a "voice-browser" that can interact with the web-services platforms. Define the markup language and the implementation of the browser is left as an exercise for the student.

Companies with large web presence platforms and disparate IVR/Call Center investments can really benefit from this technology. Think: financial institutions, customer support organizations, etc.

It's also very cheap to implement.