XML News from Tuesday, March 23, 2004

The W3C Voice Browser Working Group has released the VoiceXML 2.0 recommendation. "VoiceXML is designed for creating audio dialogs that feature synthesized speech, digitized audio, recognition of spoken and DTMF key input, recording of spoken input, telephony, and mixed initiative conversations. Its major goal is to bring the advantages of Web-based development and content delivery to interactive voice response applications." Changes since VoiceXML 1.0 include new log and metadata elements, the deprecation of dtmf, emp, div, pros, and sayas elements, and better integration with the Speech Synthesis Markup Language and other generic XML applications.


The W3C Voice Browser Working Group has also released the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification Version 1.0 Recommendation. According to the abstract, this "document defines syntax for representing grammars for use in speech recognition so that developers can specify the words and patterns of words to be listened for by a speech recognizer. The syntax of the grammar format is presented in two forms, an Augmented BNF Form and an XML Form. The specification makes the two representations mappable to allow automatic transformations between the two forms."