30 September 2002

VoiceXML standard at risk due to lack of compliance programme, Forum management A thread on the Voicexml list/group (requires Yahoo login plus signup to the list) commenting on Eisenzopf's Demystifying 10 Common Misconceptions About VoiceXML lead to some interesting material on the current state of (a) the VoiceXML Forum's compliance program and (b) the management of the Forum itself, written by an ex-Forum member. Eg: The VoiceXML Forum has had (historically) a much bigger fish to fry. It is the RAND vs Royality Free issue that is in debate in the W3C, the forum founders are much more worried about that right now than they are conformace. As such when there high level resoruce meetings it wasn't conformance we talked about but RAND. and Of the four founding members of the forum Motorola, IBM, Lucent, and AT&T three are in a world of hurt right now. IBM never really had a strong voice in the forum, so what you have is essentially 4 dead hands on the tiller. What needs to happen is some enegertic companies need to take the reigns and make it right. Which suggests that: Voicexml, whilst gaining traction in implementations, will continue to be troubled by compliance issues (remember the difficulties with HTML2, 3, 4, MS and NS flavours) which will make things tricky for pretty much everyone except proprietary platform vendors and developers Something may replace VoiceXML from a standards-body point of view (eg SALT?) creating a gap between the standards-body and what's in the market (various levels of compliance with voiceXML). ie: more trouble. See also: SALT submission to W3C could impact the future of VoiceXML (also by Jonathan Eisenzopf). 4:13:34 PM     comments