Speech and AJAX

There has been a lot of talk in the web community concerning AJAX of late. AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX). Is such a thing possible in VXML? Well I just read a very interesting piece for voicexmlreview.org (Aug2005_first_words). Rob Marchand’s describes the VXML 2.1 tag, which enables one to make voice applications feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire VXML page does not have to be reloaded each time the recipient interacts.

Where are the VXML Experts?

People often ask me, where can I find a VXML expert? I reply, there is no such thing. First of all, VXML is not a language; it is a meta-language. VXML is a subset of XML which is for creating documents that are so structured that they are smarter than the notepad document. The expertise comes in a number of forms when it comes to VXML applications, of which VXML is the least significant.
The difficulties are the same as they are with developing enterprise software. Reliability, scalability, and maintainability become paramount. Creating a VXML document is easy; reliably transmitting it to a million people is hard. It's like the Bank of America commercial; it's the processing of one successful recipient and repeating it one million times.

I am a Prophet, I see the future

Voxeo has just released a preview edition of their Prophecy platform. Check this out..

Accessible - Prophecy is an openly available, single download product with no configuration required: just one 50mb EXE including ASR (speech recognition), or an 80mb or 350mb EXE with ASR and TTS (speech synthesis)

Simple - Prophecy includes everything needed to deploy voice/IVR apps, including full VoiceXML and CCXML browsers, high quality ASR and TTS, a built in web server with PHP 5.1 and Java/JSP support, a built-in SIP soft phone for testing, and out-of-the-box support for most SIP VOIP service providers and gizmos

100% Standards based - Prophecy includes the first (and only) VoiceXML browser to pass 100% of the mandatory and optional VoiceXML compliance tests and includes the worlds most proven CCXML implementation

Inexpensive - Prophecy is free for two ports, and $249 for four ports, and $549 for each additional port

This is a really interesting development. I have not downloaded it yet, but its contribution to voice application pervasiveness may be huge. Imagine, the development of speech applications might be comparable to the development of web applications.