A very interesting new extension for the Firefox web browser became available recently on alphaWorks (IBM’s site devoted to emerging technologies). The “Tadpole” extension implements the X+V specification for the Firefox web browser.
Those already familiar with X+V know that the Opera browser has, for some time, supported this language for building multimodal applications. However, a Firefox extension for X+V raises some additional possibilities — a mashup between X+V and XUL anyone?
While I lack the courage to build the necessary software prerequisites to run this extension (like the Opera browser’s support for X+V, the Tadpole extension will only work on Windows) reading about it did inspire me to upgrade to the latest version of the Opera browser — 9.24 — and play around with some X+V samples.
It got me thinking about the X+V standard and where it’s heading. It’s very likely that the W3C’s work on the new VoiceXML 3.0 standard will incorporate changes meant to support multimodal applications. A sneak preview of the new standard can be viewed on the W3C site.
To say that I’m excited for the first public draft of the VoiceXML 3.0 standard next Spring would be a monumental understatement!