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IBM Develops Technology To Talk To Web
ProgramErgoSum writes to tell us that IBM's Indian-based research arm is trying to bring a new dimension to web interaction through voice interaction on your mobile phone. Developing a new protocol, Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP), the hope is to allow users to talk to the web and get a response. Without more explanation I'm hoping this goes about as far as the gopher web. "The spoken web is a network of voice sites or interconnected voice and the response the company got in some pilot projects in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat and the kind of innovations that people came up with were just mind-boggling, Gupta said. "
Agreed. Especially since CSS has supported aural media (including multiple voices or generic speaker categories like "child", "male", "female" for different speakers in a story, for instance) for quite a while now.
There's a good (and recent) summary of the situation here:
http://lab.dotjay.co.uk/notes/css/aural-speech/
If you want an open source solution, you should probably look to the firevox (as opposed to firefox etc.) community. Otherwise, Opera is probably your best bet. As far as usage goes: I think it's still pretty limited, but definitely worth considering for future projects that need (or can benefit from) such features, rather than some proprietary solution. Especially since it's a relatively small amount of extra work that can be overlaid onto existing web pages.