What are voice applications?

Voice applications are applications in which the input and/or output are through a spoken, rather than a graphical, user interface. The application files can reside on the local system, an intranet, or the Internet. Users can access the deployed applications anytime, anywhere, from any telephone.

“Voice-enabling the World Wide Web” does not simply mean:

• Using spoken commands to tell a visual browser to look up a specific Web address or go to a particular bookmark
• Having a visual browser throw away the graphics on a traditional visual Web page and read the rest of the information aloud
• Converting the bold or italics on a visual Web page to some kind of emphasized speech

Rather, voice applications provide an easy and novel way for users to surf or shop on the Internet—“browsing by voice.” Users can interact with Web-based data (that is, data available via Web-style architecture such as servlets, ASPs, JSPs, Java Beans, CGI scripts, etc.) using speech rather than a keyboard and mouse.

The form that this spoken data takes is often not identical to the form it takes in a visual interface, due to the inherent differences between the interfaces. For this reason, transcoding—that is, using a tool to automatically convert HTML files to VoiceXML—may not be the most effective way to create voice applications.