There has been much talk of late on Microsoft’s announcement that it will support VoiceXML in a forthcoming version of Speech Server. Many that I have read or listened to have pointed to this as
- Good news; and,
- Evidence that open standards (like VoiceXML) are truly the best way to develop phone-based application.
There is ample evidence that Microsoft has no problem advancing it’s own standard – even under the banner of “openness” – if it sees a financial benefit in doing so. If you don’t agree, I’d refer you to the debate raging about an open document format. So, while I agree wholeheartedly with the second point, I’m not so sure I agree with the first. At least not totally.
I think the bad news in Microsoft’s announcement can be identified by remembering what it’s nascent SALT specification was designed to do. Speech Application Language Tags were designed to be extensions to XHTML ““ in other words, the specification was developed specifically to build multimodal applications. And although you can build pure telephone applications with SALT, this was not the original intent.
So, if Microsoft suddenly got religion and decided to support VoiceXML for building telephone applications it may mean that multimodal applications aren’t going anywhere for a while. That’s bad news in my opinion.
I’d ask that readers refute this assertion by pointing out some existing production uses of multimodal technology. If they can find any…