There are some great resources on the web for developers wanting to learn more about voice applications, and for others who want to know what is possible with voice technologies. Here are a few of my favorites.
There is a huge trove of articles available on the Developer.com site that features articles on VoIP, speech technology platforms and a large number of very good tutorials.
Ken Rehor’s World of VoiceXML has a large volume of information about voice technologies, including platforms, tutorials, presentations, links to the underlying specs and a lot more. Worth checking out — Ken is one of the authors of VoiceXML, and is currently one the Board of Directors of the VoiceXML Forum. He works for Vocalocity — the company that is the steward of the OpenVXI open source VoiceXML platform.
There is a site called HAWHAW (yes, that’s actually the name) that is home to one of the coolest PHP class libraries I have come across in a while. Its available for free, and is extremely useful for creating multimodal (voice and mobile) applications. There are some intuitive examples on this site that can help anyone with experience using PHP and some knowledge of OO programming get started creating mobile and voice applications. In a few weeks, I hope to have a tutorial posted demonstrating how to use this tool to create a simple application for local governments. The tutorial will demonstrate how to create a water meter reading submission application that can be accessed via the web, mobile phone (WAP) or by voice. Stay tuned…