On Friday I received an email from Ken Rehor at Cisco Systems reminding me that today marks the 10th anniversary of “the first draft of VoiceXML” (meaning Rev 0.9). There is no question that the W3C-sanctioned standard for a mark-up language for developers of speech-based interactive applications is what makes “Recombinant Telephony” possible. Combined with ccXML (for call control), you have all the verbs you need to build the sorts of ‘rich phone apps’ at the root of better customer self-service, as well as mobile versions of popular search, messaging and social networking applications.

In our “Foundations” report (issued earlier this year), we estimate that businesses will spend roughly $2 billion on speech applications and platforms (both on premises and “in the cloud”). Even in this chilly world economy, we see low, double-digit growth in spending as the well-defined standard, coupled with well understood API’s into mature “platforms” fosters proliferation of truly useful (and usable) multi-modal applications that integrate automated speech processing.

I know that last sentence was a mouthful, but XML-based scripts along with all those REST-ful architectures and graphical development environments have helped a new generation of developers re-discover the phone. They, in turn, are doing “mash-ups” that seamlessly move from spoken word to screen based communications and back again as appropriate. None of this would be possible without the existence of a standard mark-up language for speech. That’s why we see spending growing to $3.25 billion by 2013, with lots of opportunity for both application developers and system integrators to make the phone more Web-like in terms of the services that it can deliver.

Categories: Articles