RE: For those of you interested in broadcast and voiceXML

PublicVoiceXML- European radio stations evaluating 
VoiceXML

PublicVoiceXML (www.publicVoiceXML.org) is both, the name 
of a VoiceXML 2.0 compliant browser and the name of a trial project with 
European community radio stations, who are evaluating VoiceXML technology for 
their day-to-day business. VoiceXML is a browser for users, who call an 
interactive service via a (mobile) phone. It follows the W3C VoiceXML 
specifications, which are supported by the VoiceXML forum, an organisation, 
which has been set up by IEEE. Standardisation efforts have been now taken over 
by W3C in the Voice Browser Working group.

The project consortium consists of:

· PUBLIC VOICE Lab as the project 
initiator and co-ordinator together with

TEAM TEICHENBERG, both located in Vienna

· a software team in Chandigarh, 
India

· MTA SZTAKI in Budapest, also 
hosting the W3C office for Eastern Europe

· Vienna's community radio station 
Orange 94.0, who has contributed to the user requirements phase and has been 
integrating PublicVoiceXML into their content management and remote journalists 
management system.

PublicVoiceXML is designed to be used by SMEs, and it works nicely 
on low cost telephony hardware. The protocol handling is making use of 
ISDN-CAPI, which works fine e.g. with the ISDN B1 active card from AVM. Analogue 
lines are currently not supported, as too many country/telco specific cases for 
DDI or disconnect handling would need to be taken into account. The VoiceXML 
browser is written in C++ and comes with a lot of comment lines (explaining each 
function) and nice logging features.PublicVoiceXML supports all "must-have" tags 
of the VoiceXML 2.0 specs (speech recognition is not yet implemented). A 
pre-release running on Windows platforms has been published on SourceForge in 
Dec. 2002 and a Linux version was made available recently (https://sourceforge.net/projects/publicvoicexml/). 

The consortium has performed the W3C 
implementation report test (http://www.w3.org/Voice/2003/ir/voicexml20-ir.html) and is using the results for further improvements. Most of the trial 
applications were built on a basic framework developed within the project. This 
framework uses PHP as a middleware, the Postgres database (through the PEAR 
database abstraction layer), and the Smarty template engine for the generation 
of HTML and VoiceXML pages. This results in clean PHP code, and the separation 
of presentation from business logic. HTML templates can be edited by designers 
(not necessarily having programming skills), and VoiceXML scripts can be 
fine-tuned without touching the PHP code.

Trials at community radio stations have been carried out and are 
well documented on the project web site. Embedding basic speech recognition is 
already scheduled and there is provision for telco-grade HW to be supported in 
Software & Service Technologies – Issue no. 
4, October 2003, page 4 the near future. 
Exploitation of the project results will be effected through providing support 
for customisation, integration and double licensing to telecommunication 
companies.