November / December 2002

Dear Readers,

VoiceXML has picked up a tremendous amount of momentum in 2002. The December 16, 2002 issue of "The Economist" printed an interesting article entitled "The Power of Voice". The article notes that despite the difficulties in the telecom industry, innovation has not been stifled. The article then goes on to present VoiceXML as a key innovation in enabling next generation telecom applications. We happen to agree whole-heartedly with the author!

This issue of the VoiceXML is hitting the newsstands late, but you'll be glad you waited, as we have an excellent selection of good technical articles to share with you this month. First up is Dave Burke from Voxpilot with an excellent discussion on how to enhance the performance of your VoiceXML applications using caching. Dave begins by sketching out the concept of caching in general and then gets down to the details on how you can use the HTTP caching related headers, as well as the maxage and maxstale attributes in VoiceXML 2.0.

Our second article describes the tools initiative that has been recently launched within the VoiceXML Forum. David Thomson brings us an overview of this work and the ideas behind it. The idea here is that while VoiceXML and its companion specifications standardize the way we encode spoken dialogs, there are a lot of other processes and artifacts associated with speech-applications and the tools used to development them that are not at all standardized. This work is one of the new Forum activities for 2003. Read David's article and get involved!

This month, Rob Marchand's First Words Column gets in the details of handling recognition results in VoiceXML 2.0. If you haven't made yourself familiar with this area in the 2.0 specification, be sure to read this column. In addition, Rob includes a plug for the upcoming VoiceXML UGM at AVIOS and gives you information on how to get involved.

Matt Oshry answers your questions again in the Speak and Listen column. This month he tackles some nitty gritty questions about the inputmodes and universals properties defined in VoiceXML 2.0. Matt also provides some handy direction in how to handle recorded audio data on your application server that has been submitted by a VoiceXML browser. To have your VoiceXML question answered in a future column, drop Matt a note at submit your question here: http://www.voicexmlreview.org/questions.html.

Finally, in closing, I'd like to remind you that the VoiceXML Review's 2003 Call for Papers and Author Kit has been published on-line. If you have something of general interest to share with the VoiceXML community, please check out the new editorial calendar for 2002 and submit your article. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Sincerely,

Jonathan Engelsma
Editor-in-Chief
VoiceXML Review
Jonathan.Engelsma@voicexmlreview.org

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