VoiceXML Conformance Testing

By Ken Rehor and Jonathan Engelsma

Two of the principal design goals of VoiceXML are to "promote service portability across implementation platforms," and to "shield application authors from low-level, and platform-specific details." [Ref: Section 1.2.2 "Goals of VoiceXML" http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-voicexml20-20030220]

"VoiceXML is a common language for content providers, tool providers, and platform providers."

Why should you care about application portability?

Application portability allows you to chose between vendors for different application requirements, such as cost, scale, reliability, administration features, telephony capabilities, and other features. Another critical choice is deployment architecture; you can choose to deploy your VoiceXML application in-house using an on-premises platform, outsource using a voice service provider, or a combination of the two.

Standards

Standards define unbiased reference points for interfaces, communication, and commerce. They are essential for any industry's viability, whether the standard pertains to weights and measurements of goods, or voice markup languages. Industries grow through the interoperation of competing products, which results in lower cost of goods. Interface standards encourage innovation of components. In order to achieve interoperation, these interfaces must be clearly documented, and testable with objective measures.

VoiceXML platforms obviously are required to support VoiceXML 2.0 (the "Candidate Recommendation" is the latest version). But other components of the W3C Speech Interface Framework (developed by the W3C Voice Browser Working Group http://www.w3.org/Voice/) are also required, such as the W3C Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (specifically the XML format, commonly referred to as GrXML and/or SRGS) and the W3C Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML).

VoiceXML application portability also depends upon platform-specific default attribute values (such as timeout values), platform-specific features, and audio encoding types. How an application behaves in practice also depends upon runtime characteristics outside the scope of the Speech Interface Framework, including network performance, caching, platform and network reliability, platform capacity, etc.

VoiceXML Forum Certification Program
The VoiceXML Forum's Certification Program certifies that implementation platforms conform to VoiceXML and other required languages. Future work will include certification of applications and tools.

By ensuring that certified platforms meet the requirements specified by the W3C standards, our goals are:

o Assured interoperability of platforms, voice service providers, tools, and applications
o Eliminate customer confusion over language compatibility (VoiceXML Forum Logo program to identify certified implementations)
o Promote common understanding of language functionality
o Common test suite available to the entire industry
o Certified 3rd-party independent testing

The Certification Program is developed and managed by the VoiceXML Forum Conformance Committee, with support from the IEEE-ISTO (http://www.ieee-isto.org) and NCC (http://www.ncc.co.uk/). The members of the Conformance Committee represent various companies in the speech and telecom industries. Many of the members of the Conformance Committee are also members of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group.

The Voice Browser Working Group included language conformance requirements as part of the various specifications in the Speech Interface Framework. The group also defined a set of test assertions and test scripts as part of the "Implementation Report" for each specification.

The Conformance Committee defines platform conformance requirements based on the W3C standards. We work with the Voice Browser Working Group on VoiceXML clarifications, enhancements, and extensions.
We also work with the VoiceXML Forum's Marketing Committee to develop a branding program for VoiceXML platforms, and the Education Committee on tutorials and documentation.

Early efforts from the Conformance Committee members include publication of VoiceXML sample documents, and the proposal of a testing framework. This framework was subsequently further developed by the W3C Voice Browser Working Group for theVoiceXML "Implementation Report". This report includes a test suite to prove implementability of the language, not to test the details of a particular implementation platform.

The Conformance Committee has adopted this test suite as the basis for the conformance test suite. In addition, the committee has developed an environment for maintaining the current test suite, and introducing and testing new VoiceXML conformance test scripts.

3rd party testing

An independent testing laboratory will run the conformance tests on behalf of VoiceXML Forum. The Director of the VoiceXML Forum will oversee platform testing to ensure that no members are privy to the confidential information regarding any vendor's testing status.

back to the top

 

Copyright © 2001-2003 VoiceXML Forum. All rights reserved.
The VoiceXML Forum is a program of the
IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization (IEEE-ISTO).