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PISCATAWAY, NJ - The VoiceXML Forum announced its support for the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) release of Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 2.0 as a Proposed Recommendation. VoiceXML 2.0 has advanced to the Proposed Recommendation stage, and is therefore one small step away from becoming an official W3C standard. The Forum also announced the availability of the X+V (XHTML+Voice Profile) specification, version 1.2. The newest version of this multimodal interface specification is now available for download on the VoiceXML Forum's Web site. "The VoiceXML Forum is pleased that VoiceXML 2.0 has reached Proposed Recommendation status," said Igor Jablokov, chairman of the VoiceXML Forum and program director, Multimodal and Voice Portal Products, IBM. "VoiceXML has become the dominant standard in enabling speech interaction across a diverse set of applications, industries and end-users. VoiceXML is a strategic part of the portfolios of many of our member companies, with industry support increasing, in large part due to the W3C's work in championing open standards. The Forum looks forward to continuing its work alongside the W3C to promote VoiceXML as the technology standard essential to making Internet content and information accessible via voice and phone." X+V brings spoken interaction to standard Web content by integrating a set of Web technologies such as XHTML and XML Events with VoiceXML and XML grammars developed as part of the W3C Speech Interface Framework. X+V brings together voice modules that support speech synthesis, speech dialogs, command and control, speech grammars and event model reuse. The newest version of X+V has been updated to complement the W3C's VoiceXML 2.0 specification. Companies such as ACCESS Co. Ltd., IBM Corp., Kirusa Inc., Motorola Inc., NewportWorks Inc., Openstream Inc., Opera Software ASA, Real Soft, Inc., SAP AG, V-Enable Inc. and Verizon have demonstrated recent interest in X+V. "As wireless technologies and pervasive computing enable access to data in multiple form factors, the use of X+V will become a catalyst for growth of the speech industry," said James Ferrans, chairman of the VoiceXML Forum's Technical Council and distinguished member of the technical staff, Motorola Labs. "The Forum is now the official steward of the X+V specification. We will be working closely with members of the W3C's Multimodal Interaction Activity and Voice Browser Working Group to continue to develop and evolve the specification."
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