So it's 2001 and most VoiceXML applications do not quite sound like Space Odyssey's Dave and HAL. But there have been giant leaps in speech recognition technology and voice services over the last several years. While the computer has not attained the sophisticated processing power of a human, if you understand the rules of user interface design and you know the limitations of the technology, you can create effective human-machine speech dialogues.

Welcome to "First Words" - the VoiceXML Review's column to teach you about VoiceXML and how you can use it. We hope you enjoy the lesson.

Passport VoiceXML and U-Voice announce a partnership to promote VoiceXML in Northern Europe. With its technical sessions, Passport VoiceXML has trained many speech application developers and contributed to the adoption of VoiceXML as the preferred standard for developing speech applications.

VoiceXML is a language for creating voice-user interfaces, particularly for the telephone. It uses speech recognition and touchtone (DTMF keypad) for input, and pre-recorded audio and text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) for output.

In August 2002 the VoiceXML Forum's Education Committee conducted an on-line survey on VoiceXML. Our objective was to try to gauge the interest level within the VoiceXML community on the various ongoing and proposed activities within the Forum so that we can better calibrate our efforts with the interests of the Forum's membership and beyond.

This article will focus on static VoiceXML pages in order to demonstrate some of the concepts, but readers should keep in mind that they can also use their favorite server-side technologies to build compelling dynamic applications.

Describes the VoiceXML application for a commercial Airlines flight tracker that delivers voice query searches of current flight status for 2000 in-air flights per day, using the TellMe Networks deployment environment, perl, javascript and server-side search of dynamic data inputs. The piece also covers general principles of usability and programming.

Enhancing VoiceXML Application Performance By Caching. By Dave Burke,. Figure 1: The VoiceXML architecture model. Why bother with Caching?

Welcome to First Words, VoiceXML Review's column that teaches you about VoiceXML and how you can use it. We hope you enjoy the lesson.

If you are new to VoiceXML, this overview article will serve as an excellent starting point. For those of you who have already been authoring VoiceXML applications with one of the software developer kits, platforms, and/or on-line developer "web studios" available from various vendors, this article goes beyond the syntactical elements of the language and describes the typical reference architecture in which the VoiceXML interpreter resides.

The VoiceXML Forum last week launched a pilot certification program that marks the start of its effort to promote interoperability of voice applications across platforms, tools and applications. According to Ken Rehor, chair of the Forum's VoiceXML conformance committee, the VoiceXML Platform Certification Program will consist of a series of tests designed to determine whether a VoiceXML platform is fully compliant with the latest release of the specification.

Different projects have different VoiceXML, grammar, audio, and script files associated with them, which may be edited or uploaded. Projects may be local, that is with all files hosted statically on voxBuilder, or remote, by pointing at an external web server under control of the developer. A combination of the two project types is possible as well e.g. host dynamic VoiceXML remotely to the platform but store static audio locally.

This article explains the recommended procedure for performing post-hangup processing on the Tellme Voice Application Network.

Below are the Definitive VoiceXML code examples supplemental to the publication Definative VoiceXML.

This article establishes VoiceXML as an analogue to the familiar realm of HTML. It then moves forward to address the various business opportunities and types of applications that have come into existence with the advent of VoiceXML.

The VoiceXML Forum is beginning to prepare for the Spring Users Group Meeting, to be held in conjunction with the AVIOS Speech Developers Conference and Expo, (http://www.avios.com/conference.htm) from March 31st to April 3rd 2003, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose California. The VoiceXML Users Group Meeting will be held on April 3, 2003.

The VoiceXML Forum's conformance program provides the industry with a test suite for VoiceXML to ensure interoperability of platforms, tools, and applications from all vendors, and clear identification of compliance to the specification.

VoiceXML 2.0 Essentials. Now, we're going to take a look at VoiceXML, a specific kind of XML designed to describe voice applications.

VoiceXML spread like wildfire in 2001. VoiceXML extends the reach and effectiveness of the Web by allowing interactivity and information delivery using voice. VoiceXML can be used to deliver customer service efficiently and inexpensively, just as companies now use HTML to deliver information quickly and cheaply.

Welcome to First Words, VoiceXML Review's column that teaches you about VoiceXML and how you can use it. The Structure of VoiceXML Documents.