Sidebar: Standards power speech apps
By Robert L. Mitchell
August 22, 2005 12:00 PM ET
Computerworld - The market for proprietary hardware and software tools is disappearing, driven by the emergence of open standards such as VoiceXML and Speech Application Language Tags (SALT). Here's a look at the existing and emerging standards in speech application development.
- VoiceXML
This World Wide Web Consortium Inc. (W3C) standard is an open standard that establishes a common dialog for speech-enabled interactive voice-response (IVR) applications. VoiceXML, which separates the application from the hardware, is well established and supported by most IVR vendors.
- SALT
A competing open standard to VoiceXML, SALT, promoted by Microsoft Corp., focuses on multimodal interactions, where voice may be combined with other forms of input, such as a Web page. The W3C is considering integrating some aspects of SALT into Version 3.0 of VoiceXML.
- Call Control XML
CCXML is companion standard to voice XML. It specifies a complementary language that adds support for call-control functions such as conferencing and call management.
- Media Resource Control Protocol
MRCP, an Internet Engineering Task Force draft standard, places an XML wrapper around speech-recognition output, creating an abstraction layer between the application and the underlying speech-recognition engine. While some products already claim to support MRCP, it isn't yet considered a mature standard.
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