1.1 Calling the Web

This book is about VoiceXML, a new language which bridges two great global networks: the public telephone network and the World Wide Web. VoiceXML browsers provide an interface between a caller on a standard telephone and an application running on the Web.

With VoiceXML, traditional Web sites can build on their existing infrastructure to add telephone access to their content and services such as e-commerce purchases. With a Web-friendly technology such as VoiceXML, it is a relatively small effort to provide a telephone interface as an alternative to a graphical interface because the layers underneath remain the same. In addition, traditional automated telephone services (voice mail, banking by phone ), which have historically been created from scratch as separate applications, can be re-designed as a telephone interface to a Web site. This can greatly reduce the amount of custom development, special skills and parallel infrastructure needed to offer services to telephone users and graphical browser users.

Imagine that you're in your car and new music you like is playing on the radio. You use your carphone to call a voice portal, a telephony Web site. A personalized portal recognizes that the call is coming from your car, offers you driving directions, speaks the latest news relevant to your business, updates you on your stock portfolio and gives you a shopping link tied to your favorite radio station so that you can order that music CD all in one phone call.

VoiceXML is not the only way to access...