The adoption and standardization of VoiceXML opened the door for revolutionary change in the IVR product category and provides significant benefits to both developers and enterprise buyers. All IVR implementations require some degree of application customization, usually accomplished via a scripting language or RAD tool. Voice XML was created and adopted by the primary standards making body (the W3C) to improve and standardize the scripting of IVR applications. VoiceXML allows for a superset of functionality, incorporating the best features from proprietary IVR systems, while dramatically improving integration techniques and the ease of application modification.
The VoiceXML language has its roots as a research project at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Based on the Worldwide Web Consortium’s (W3C’s) Extensible Markup Language (XML). VoiceXML is a tag-based language, that is a very readable, and should be easy to understand for any programmer with good knowledge of HTML and common data scripting languages (such as PHP, ASP, JSP, etc.). Thanks to active support from America’s leading technology companies, including AT&T, IBM, Lucent, Microsoft, Motorola, and Sun Microsystems, the VoiceXML language entered the public domain in 2000 and has since become the accepted lingua franca for voice applications. Today, over 600 companies support VoiceXML and use it to develop applications. It is estimated that over 50,000 developers are now expert in VoiceXML, and the number is still growing rapidly.
