VoiceXML looks a lot like HTML. In fact, its designers hope that VoiceXML will mediate the creation of a "voice web" just as HTML mediated the creation of the visual Web. While this may very well happen, the more immediate beneficiaries of VoiceXML are not Internet users, but telephone companies, call center operators, and telephone-based CRM operations.

The VoiceXML revolution is just beginning. Only within the past few months have VoiceXML interpreters become robust, feature-rich and capable of supporting a carrier-grade commercial application. Work still remains to further improve scalability, efficiency and density, and even to agree on a common interpretation for every tag and attribute in the specification. This article assumes that carrier-grade VoiceXML interpreters will continue to mature and evolve, and focuses instead on the challenges of developing a commercial-grade VoiceXML application to run on the interpreter.

A voice-based application is as frustrating as a traffic jam if it doesn't meet the user's expectations. This article takes you step by step through the process of usability testing your VoiceXML application.

Imagine, for a moment, a technology being accessed by two billion people -- roughly a third of the world's population. According to a recent study from Datacomm Research, that's just the number of people who will use Internet voice portals, voice-enabled Web sites, and Web-based voice response systems by the year 2005.

The VoiceXML Forum and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Tuesday reached an agreement under which the W3C will take the lead in technical development while the VoiceXML Forum focuses on interoperability.

So you want to develop and deploy a VoiceXML application, but you're not sure whether to build your own VoiceXML gateway, buy a turnkey solution, or host your application? This article will lay out the pros and cons when considering a VoiceASP and discuss the features, costs, and tools provided by each of the top vendors.

An area where we have an opportunity to make VoiceXML easier to use and more portable is in development and runtime tools. VoiceXML provides two significant advantages in authoring speech-enabled applications, when compared to previous methods. It allows a developer to build speech services with less effort and it allows applications written for one speech platform to run on another speech platform.

In this article we will discuss how caching can be used to enhance the performance of VoiceXML applications. Caching is a strategy for storing temporary 'objects' (e.g. VoiceXML resources) local to the VoiceXML Interpreter that can be employed by the application developer for optimising these latencies.

So what's new with VoiceXML 2.0? Plenty. What was a single language, VoiceXML 1.0, has been extended into several related markup languages, each providing a useful facility for developing web-based speech applications. These facilities are organized into the W3C Speech Interface Framework.

Many questions must be answered for the VoiceXML class of applications. This article summarizes some of the critical issues that must be addressed even before the actual development begins.

In this article, we examine some of the key changes in the first public working draft of VoiceXML 2.0 as compared to the VoiceXML 1.0 specification.

In this monthly column, an industry expert will answer common questions about VoiceXML and related technologies. Readers are encouraged to submit questions about VoiceXML, including development, voice-user interface design, and speech technology in general, or how VoiceXML is being used commercially in the marketplace. If you have a question about VoiceXML, e-mail it to speak.and.listen@voicexmlreview.org and be sure to read future issues of VoiceXML Review for the answer.

In Part II of our introduction to VoiceXML 2.0 grammars, we will learn how to use tokens, rules and operators to create grammars that match natural utterances.

This article provides an overview of VoiceXML and the VoiceXML help tag. It also includes some resources so you can learn more about VoiceXML.

An area where we have an opportunity to make VoiceXML easier to use and more portable is in development and runtime tools. VoiceXML provides two significant advantages in authoring speech-enabled applications, when compared to previous methods. It allows a developer to build speech services with less effort and it allows applications written for one speech platform to run on another speech platform. These advantages are diminished, however, if software tools used to create and support VoiceXML code are inadequate or incompatible.

Ever wondered what VoiceXML is? In this sample chapter from Wrox we will learn a bit more about it and see a working example of VoiceXML in action.In this article we will see a sample chapter from Wrox's "Early Adopter VoiceXML" book, which was written by Stephen Breitenbach.

As devices shrink in size and expand in functionality, "input" continues to pose critical challenges for mobile users, application developers, and device manufacturers.

This month, we move beyond "Hello, World" to look more closely at the two standard components used in VoiceXML applications: forms and menus. These components are the basis of all VoiceXML dialogs - conversations between the system and the user.

Get a gentle introduction to the world of computerized telephone applications. This chapter from "Definitive VoiceXML" will show the motivation behind VoiceXML as a clean, enterprise-computing-friendly, open standards technology that unifies the many aspects of the voice application world.

This sample chapter describes how to select and assemble VoiceXML development tools into an efficient environment that serves your individual needs. We will look at tools for coding and debugging as well as commercial toolkits and Web-based development environments that package many of the necessary tools.