Voice Web Solutions Introduces Advanced Speech Capabilities for Dreamweaver MX
Voice Web Solutions, a provider of speech-enabled document technology, announced the Voice Web Studio for Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX.
Voice Web Studio accelerates the adoption of speech enabled documents and web content by providing an integrated development environment directly within Dreamweaver MX. This enhanced capability for building and deploying speech applications provides multimodal and telephony access to information, applications and Web services via telephones, PCs or PDAs.
Today's introduction of the Voice Web Studio enables the Dreamweaver development community, more than 2.4 million developers strong, to speech-enable existing Web sites and make them universally accessible to the disabled population. The Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) specification, developed by Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and other industry leaders, is an emerging technology for deploying voice services that will reach out to the world's 40 million visually impaired, not to mention the other disabled communities and the mobile workforce. SALT adheres a speech interface to existing Web markup languages such as HTML, XHTML and XML. The regulatory push that is fostering the growth of this market (Section 508 of the American Disabilities Act) is just the foundation for this market. Industry analysts forecast worldwide revenues for the speech technology market will range from $1.6 billion (Cahners In-Stat Group) to $3.5 billion (IDC) to $16.3 billion (The Kelsey Group) by 2005.
"Voice Web Studio for Dreamweaver MX enables developers to tap into the emerging market of the Voice Web. By combining a familiar development environment with our unique methods for building voice-activated content, millions of programmers can now use speech as another mode of communicating to a larger market," said Brian Ty Graham, president of Voice Web Solutions. "SALT has enabled us to finally give developers a tool that helps them understand multi-modal and telephony development directly within the most familiar Web authoring tool on the market place today, as well as create content that is truly accessible to all people."
Web sites authored with Voice Web Studio in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX enable the end-user community to access content using standard telephones or computers, without having to pay for screen reading software that can cost in excess of $1,000 USD each. By using common skills and familiar methods, developers can enhance existing Web sites into sites that read the contents back to the user, as well as allow the user to verbally fill out and navigate forms and documents. By using Voice Web Studio, companies leverage their investments by reusing existing Web content and programming skills to support both Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems and a Voice Web presence. Extending business services and processes to anyone that has a telephone open up new business opportunities that initially target mobile workers and the disabled.