Rick Parfitt

We live in the midst of a revolution. Computers have dramatically accelerated the ways we can manipulate the world and even replicate ourselves. In just 25 years growing magnitudes of computational power are making it possible to perform such human tasks as speech recognition. But without progress on many fronts, what is a machine to do with the translations of human desires? Fortunately, in this same time frame, networking and the encapsulation of data representing all aspects of our lives have reached global proportions. Computers that recognize speech can respond. While XML is a key component in making this possible, as in VoiceXML, the role goes beyond simply using new markup tags to identify data. This article probes the technology and the capabilities of VoiceXML, a new standard adopted in May 2000 by the W3C. The initial project resulted from collaboration b... (more)