BASKING RIDGE, N.J.-AT&T Corp., Lucent Technologies Inc. and Motorola Inc., among
others, have joined to create a standard that will allow users to access Web-based information via mobile or landline
phones, called Voice eXtensible Markup Language.
The group, called the VXML Forum, aims to set a standard that
equipment and infrastructure providers, speech technology and speech application developers, content providers and
communications carriers all can use.
“Just as standardization of (Hypertext Markup Language) drove the
adoption of traditional Web applications, standardization of VXML will drive the adoption of voice-enabled
applications,” said Maria Martinez, vice president and general manager of Motorola’s Internet and Connectivity
Solutions Division.
She said 58 percent of the population owns a telephone but not a computer. The goal of the
forum is to give these folks the ability to dial into the Internet or corporate intranet from any phone, and through normal
conversational voice commands get a variety of information content. So a salesperson could get status information
from a corporate database while someone else could get the day’s weather report, all via voice-recognition
commands.
“When people can interact with a Web application or an (Internet Protocol)-based service this
way, the ordinary touch-tone phone literally becomes the ubiquitous Internet access device,” said Larry Rebiner,
vice president of research for AT&T Labs.
Those accessing the Internet today must use some sort of monitor-based
device to do so because all Internet content is written in HTML, which prompts the retrieval of an image file when
accessing a given site. With VXML, a programmer could write applications that instead prompt audio responses to
voice queries for phone users.
The first VXML specification will be based on phone markup language from AT&T
and Lucent using Motorola’s VoxML Internet voice language. Other participating companies include 3Com Corp.,
British Telecommunications plc, General Magic, Hewlett-Packard, IBM Corp., Lernout & Hauspie, Nortel Networks
and Philips N.V.
