Nuance announced that they have acquired BeVocal and the big rumor is that Tellme is close to an acquisition deal – possibly Microsoft. While Tellme is publicly denying the Microsoft acquisition, I know a number of insiders who have exited the company recently.

Both the Nuance/BeVocal and TellMe/Microsoft acquisitions aren’t particularly that wonderful overall in my opinion – reinforcing my earlier post 2 months ago about the general speech industry.

The BeVocal acquisition is interesting. It has raised $85M from venture capital giants such as Mayfield since it started in 1999. A $140M price tag on an $85M raise with a company that generates $20M isn’t exactly a home run for a tier one VC, but it’s better than a sharp stick in the eye.

If the rumors are accurate, however, Tellme is generating $100M in revenue and a $200M price tag on a $250M VC raise would not be too wonderful. My biggest question: is the $100M not sustainable? They claimed in the past profitability on those number. Maybe their costs are exploding or the massive acquisition of SBC, AT&T, Bellsouth, Cingular and the rest of the U.S. telco is imploding those revenue deals that they had with AT&T.

But my bigger question about Tellme is “why Microsoft?”

Why not Google? Google and Tellme seems to make a lot more sense. Maybe Google can’t figure out what they want to be in the voice space and Tellme is too pricey. But a Google/Tellme fit seems to make much more sense in all levels. Both companies are in the valley. Tellme has a number of large carrier and Enterprise relationships. Tellme is more of a unix (or Intel Solaris to be specific) technology shop and looks and feels much more like a Google company than a Redmond company. Microsoft isn’t exactly killing it with their Voice strategy. Microsoft is definitely starting to see the light on software-as-a-service… but their voice and speech attempts have not been wonderful.

The ultimate winner in this entire story just might be Voxeo. Voxeo seems to be growing rapidly in the past couple of years and they have an advantage by having both software and software-as-service with their hosting capabilities. While both Tellme and BeVocal both had their own platforms, Voxeo has been able to successfully add an on-premise channel to their offering and find additional revenue streams and customers who want either on-prem, hosted or both (like in a network fail-over situation). Voxeo has also been able to retain profitability, growth and successfully service the mid-market. Johnathon Taylor, Voxeo’s CEO, once told me: “I hate carriers. We don’t want to work with carriers,” and this just might have saved his business. Voxeo founders were also able to buy back their company from the VCs are they had invested $60M during the dot com hayday (same timeframe as BeVocal and TellMe). While the big boys have duked it out while the carriers have consolidated into the gang of 3 – Voxeo has been steadily rolling up the mid-market and smiling while they do it. Even with the latest Prophecy platform, they’ve included both ASR, TTS, VoiceXML and CCXML all in one nice and neat package — and it’s good enough for most applications.

The loser in this activity? Well, Nuance clearly stands to both win and lose. Nuance clearly needs to acquire companies to grow their revenue base given that speech revenues probably aren’t long-lasting – they’re doing so at the danger of continuing to cannibalize their base and eat their partners. While they’ve been doing this all along – it continues to be more explicit with each turn. I’m also sure that the Nuance / BeVocal acquisition is both an opportunity and also a direct hit against Tellme – given that Nuance sued them last year. If Microsoft acquires Tellme, that will be one more competitive notch against Nuance as Microsoft continues to try and increase their positioning as a leader in VoiceXML and ASR/TTS. But, who knows if that will really ever materialize into anything more than a half-hearted attempt by Redmond. I think Vista and Office are much more in trouble in the macro picture for Microsoft.

technorati tags: tellme, bevocal, nuance, google, microsoft, voxeo

This is a question I have been pondering lately. I’m not as active in the speech industry these days – for several reasons. I won’t entirely list them here, I’ll save that for another post one day. However, one reason is because I believe the speech industry is stagnated a bit and isn’t enjoying the growth we’re seeing in other technology sectors. I am however still watching the industry and still involved loosely with a few projects.

Today, I received my normal email solicitation from Bill Meisel. Bill is a legend in the Speech Recognition world if you don’t already know him. He’s currently an analyst and runs a firm called TMA Associates and publishes a newsletter titled “Speech Strategy News”. Today’s brief email said the following:

Apple’s iPhone is a well-publicized example of the changes in telephony. On the device side, the wireless phone is migrating into all all-purpose portable assistant and entertainment center. Communications infrastructure is also getting a makeover with the integration of the telephone and other communications modalities using Web and network standards. Ad-supported services, including directory assistance and information portals, are making telephony even more analogous to the developments in the Web world.

But the Web analogy can be taken too far. The Graphical User Interface that served the PC and Web world so well has obvious limitations on mobile devices with small screens and clumsy text-input modes. Any phone can call a network-based service and immediately have a Voice User Interface using speech recognition, and that VUI is the same on any phone. This creates opportunities that some companies are already beginning to exploit for services to consumers and businesses. Call centers will soon find that free directory assistance and other trends increase the number of calls and change their nature. Company telephone systems are also evolving into Unified Communications systems, and speech technology makes the many features of such systems usable. Speech technology can also automate field forces using only cell phones.

Do speech recognition and other speech technologies work? Yes, despite a tendency to paint anything short of human abilities as a limitation. When implemented well and used in appropriate applications, the technology is extremely effective. And the many successful deployed applications prove it.

Bill’s right about how much a device can be limited compared to the offering of an in-network speech recognition application. Speech recognition applications can also enjoy a lot of the benefits of a web application, especially when built on a VoiceXML (and CCXML and other related web standards) architecture.

But what’s the hangup for the industry? Why the slow down?

It seems, like usual, there are always a multiple of reasons – many of which are timing, technology, finance and just pure circumstantial – all of which are uncontrollable. However, I believe there are a couple of reasons that are addressable by the industry as a whole.
First part, the pricing doesn’t work.

Lucky for Nuance these days, they’re not only the 800 lb gorilla – they’re really the only significant player left in the marketplace as far as real speech recognition and text-to-speech product offerings go. They’re the monopoly player in the speech space, and they’re really exploiting that advantage from a distribution and pricing standpoint. They’re going to extract as much from that position in terms of power and pricing as they can. Ultimately, I believe, to their detriment – or better said, to the reduction of their own marketplace.
Speech has always been a “nice to have” – not because you can’t build compelling applications that reduce cost. Not because you can’t craft a compelling ROI. Mike Dickerson, my previous co-founder at Vocalocity (which we are no longer at), always use to say that speech suffers from the “I” part of the ROI being “too expensive” to get to the “return on” part of ROI. In other words, if the investment is so large that you have to risk the return, it’s no longer compelling and just increases the risk that you were hoping to mitigate in the business case. Speech is just too expensive. Speech, except for a few applications, is a nice-to-have, it’s a luxury item – it’s nice technology, but only for the chosen few. It really helps and generally people like it – if you are willing to spend more to get it. In every case I was involved in, once you got it deployed and working, they loved it. You just had to justify the cost first, and build a business case that made sense. That seemed to always be the hardest with a nice-to-have technology like speech recognition.

Unfortunately, as the web continues to be more pervasive and ubiquitous, it continues to be just as fast, far less risky and much less expensive than voice. And Bill is right, “the web analogy can be taken too far”. People should stop trying to make the voice web fit the visual web. However, what I think we’re seeing, is the interactive web is making it more difficult to justify (at the current pricing) the voice web. Of course, I’m not trying to say the voice web is necessarily going away – that would be silly. However, with email, IM, SMS and web browsers built directly into these devices – and with the availability of wi-fi networks everywhere – it’s almost impossible to not have access to the Web, when needed. Also, as more and more software is deployed over the web as services using a modern browser, you almost don’t even have to have your own computer to gain access to necessary data and applications anymore (Another early justification for the phone and VoiceXML, that’s losing ground).

So how do you change this? Lowering pricing is certainly one way. I think you’d start to see, over a period of time, the ability to make speech more dominant in phone applications. However, you have to couple that with a healthy eco-system and partner base of developers to get innovative applications conceived, developed and deployed. And that leads to the second issue…

Second part, the ecosystem isn’t healthy.

The voice ecosystem has been dying in the past 2-3 years. The evidence of this is that many small to mid-size companies (in relative terms to the industry itself) have merged with larger companies. SpeechWorks was bought by Scansoft and then Scansoft and Nuance merged into Nuance after many years of fierce competition. VoiceGenie was acquired by Genesys Labs, which was also the acquirer of Telera. Numerous smaller companies are either getting collapsed by larger companies or they’re simply going away. Several smaller companies such as Voxeo and Angel.com seem to really be making serious headway in their businesses (I will say because I believe they’ve embraced the web model directly) and are growing significantly. However, the sign of so much merger mania really is the fall out of the fact that the “speech industry” isn’t there. It’s not big enough, it’s not compelling enough, and hard enough to maintain on its own. Speech really is just (or really should be) another technology feature of an interactive application. And, to make matters worse, even the industry conference and magazine recently merged with a larger conference as John Kelly sold SpeechTek to Information Today. Mergers can be good. In this case, they’re the direct reaction to survival. You must merge to stay alive and in most of these cases, that’s the underlying reason. Heck, even Intel sold off its telecommunications unit, Dialogic, to another smaller company, Eicon Networks – and Brooktrout (the Dialogic competitor) has merged with Excel Switching to become Cantata. While they’re not speech only companies, everyone in the industry recognizes them as major players in the industry. (By the way, these are just a few mergers, there have been many, many more such as Intervoice and Edify or the shocking IP Unity and Glenayre).

If you’re in to “reading the tealeaves”, another interesting note is how many people are “leaving” the industry. Or, maybe not really leaving, but relocating to bigger opportunities, whether that be directly or indirectly related to the “speech industry”. Industry veteran and ex co-founder and CTO of Snowshore and CTO of Cantata just left this past week to join BEA as Deputy CTO. Smart move in my opinion given the state of everything that’s going on there and in the industry. Of course, numerous other people have joined Google in the past 2 years from the industry.
So, where is the industry headed?

Gosh, if I knew that, I’d still be in the industry and probably be an analyst, or better yet, a billionaire.

There are a lot of changing dynamics in the “speech industry”. The 800 lb gorilla is small in relative terms, they have a $2B market cap and did almost $400M in 2006. But, they also have a fairly diverse portfolio of products such as scanners and dictation, of which speech recognition is only one part.

For many years, we’ve thought IBM and Microsoft would get serious and get into the business. They’ve made some decent steps forward, but nothing serious yet.

Like we’ve said in the past, maybe 2007 will be the year… (But, don’t bet on it)

technorati tags: speech, voicexml, ccxml, nuance, cantata, bea, asr, tts

I got notified today by the RFC Editor of the IETF that one of the specifications I co-authored with Dave Burke of Voxpilot, Mark Scott of Genesys Labs, RJ Auburn of Voxeo and Scott McGlashan of HP last year has been published as an informational draft and now available.  The draft is called draft-burke-vxml-02.txt.
In the specification, we described a standard mechanism for a SIP interface to VoiceXML media services, which is commonly employed between application servers and media servers offering VoiceXML processing capabilities. Many of the modern VoiceXML browsers support a SIP interface – however, at the time, each of them had a different way to address them, how they dealt with media and how data was passed back and forth. In this specification, we tried to lay out a standard way that all VoiceXML Browsers supporting SIP should implement.

I’m not as active in the VoiceXML or W3C community as I have been in the past 5 years – however, I recently began a very interested project for a call center doing an Ajax, Web 2.0 enabled Agent Desktop and using VoiceXML and CCXML for the backend. We’re using the Voxeo software to build the application. It’s been fun getting back involved with these types of capabilities – but what is most interesting is the merging of modern web capabilities with next generation telecom and IVR to build a next generation call center application. This makes Asterisk look like a play toy. We’re using our new open source framework, called Seam(less), to rapidly built the application and integrate it into the Voxeo CCXML platform in a very unique way. I’m hoping that we’ll have the opportunity to open source some of the messaging we’ve built from the Seam(less) message broker to the Voxeo CCXML Event I/O interface. It’s truly a very interesting and powerful integration.

technorati tags: ietf, sip, call, control, ccxml, vxml, voicexml, voxeo, hp, genesys, voxpilot, seamless, asterisk, voip

Awhile back I posted that Yes.com, the interactive phone service, had shutdown – at least their phone application, which in my opinion was one of the best demonstrations of how cool speech-enable phone services could be.

I recently stumbled upon their website again from their blog and found out that they had launched again (I’m not positive when) as a vertical search engine based on what songs were playing on radio stations around the company.  OK, that’s pretty interesting.  They allow you to search for artists by name and station and give you some level of statistics about what the station is playing and what hits are playing where.

I did have some problems though, with my first attempt at using the search interface. I typed in “101.5″ and “Atlanta” to find KICKS 101.5 in Atlanta, the top Country station here in Atlanta.   Well, unfortunately, I got back “no results found”. I tried a couple of variations with no success.  I’m sure they have some tuning to do – or I just plain should have done it a different way – either way, it didn’t work as I expected.

What I’m not fully bought in to is the longevity of terrestial radio stations, period. I realize that is a strong statement. Radio has been around for a long time and it would be sad to see it go away fully, which I’m not sure will ever happen.  But the modern radio station as we hear it today is going to radically change.  With the popularity of user-driven options such as Apple’s iPod and satellite radio such as Sirrius – as well as a variety of alternate programming options such as podcasts – I see it hard to imagine tuning in to my local radio except for cases where I’m out of range, my ipod is dead or I’m just plain bored.  I’ve found recently, in the later case, I just enjoy quietness instead of repeat advertising invading my thoughts.

Previously, yes.com offered an interesting service by which you could dial a toll-free number after hearing a song on the radio – and they offered a really simple-to-use phone application which would identify the song, artist and related information based on where you heard it.  For example, I could say “KICKS 101.5″ and they’d ask me “When did you hear it?”.  I could say “10 minutes ago” and they’d play a clip of several songs around the time I selected.  I could say “that one” after hearing the clip in question and they’d proceed to tell me the artist, album, etc.  I could also “vote” for it – essentially giving “my rating” of the song.  (Which in most cases is not very helpful since I’m certainly not going to call in specifically to songs I didn’t like – so most likely ratings were already skewed). From there, they were going to allow me to digitally purchase the song or album – which I’m not sure if they ever got working.

With this service, it at least seemed to add some value to existing radio station programming.  However, I suppose they could not make money with the service – and offering this type of service with speech can certainly be expensive.  If that didn’t work from an economic model – well, no matter how cool it is, it’s time to shut it down.  Too bad, since it would have been something neat to use and I would have most likely bought songs from the radio – when I listened to radio (er, maybe that was the problem).
technorati tags: yes.com, radio, speech, music

Two major stories in the speech industry which I think are showing some overall trends to the speed of adoption of new technology and the overall proof that speech is not an industry, but a type of feature or application in an overall customer interaction use case:

Today, Intel and Eicon announced Eicon would buy the older Dialogic communications business unit.

You can read a little bit about it from CNET’s News.com.

Why is this important to the industry? Well, it’s not entirely a speech only business unit – in fact, I would bet a very, very small fraction of the company’s revenue has been impacted by speech recognition. Exactly my point. Most telephone applications today are still DTMF and will be for a long time.

Dialogic was rumored for a long time to be on the block – and the acquirer was for a long time rumored to be Cantata, the combination of Excel Switching and Brooktrout. Brooktrout was a competitor to Dialogic and another manufacturer of old telephony PC boards. However, Brooktrout’s revenue is largely FAX based as it dominates the US Fax market with a very large percentage. Excel also has a long tradition in older telephony manufacturing but not in traditional PC boards, but in larger scale, higher density “iron chassis”. Big boxes that plug in to your carrier’s facility to deliver all sorts of protocol switching such as converting from one very old TDM protocol to the next. The merger bills itself as being able to bridge the gap from the old (and profitable!) to the new (and not yet so profitable, but cool, like IMS!).

Eicon must have really impressed Intel and offered more money than the privately-held Cantata. However, I’m not sure I would personally want to be part of the combination. Eicon also manufactures older fax and telephony PC boards and a acquired Shiva awhile back (remeber the older VPN appliances during the dot com heyday?). So, if Brooktrout went for $172M, how much did Dialogic go for?

Eicon is a good company with lots of nice people. However, they’ve been late to the game with SIP and all over the map with their portfolio, including trying to have yet-another-Microsoft Speech Server TIM. It will be interesting to see how they absorb nearly 600 Dialogic engineers as they try and merge the 2 aging technologies in the age of SIP, Internet protocols, and Web 2.0.

Microsoft Speech Server reborn as Office Communication Server

Opus Research has a short advisory on this announcement.

Is this shocking? Well, not so much. It could either be yet another Microsoft branding event for mid-2006 (although they must not be fully part of the bigger MSFT branding play with everything being re-branded “Live” these days) — or — it’s just another notch in MSFT slowly starting to bring speech into the Operating System and the mainstream server line. Again, this makes sense. Speech in MSFT is just an interface, a modality, a progamming pattern, a feature or another way of interacting with a user. If MSFT can integrate speech into the main stream work flow of business communications — and make it affordable and easy to program for the masses -they’ll win, regardless of how sexy speech wants to be.

I love speech, don’t get me wrong. I love the whole idea of being able to have a natural conversation with a machine, and having it do what I want it to. That’s probably why I like to program them so much.


Me: Human
You: Computer.

You do what I say (and sometimes, that's not fair as I'm a human and very imperfect darnnit!).


SpeechTek Fall 2006 was this week!

How absolutely depressing since this is probably the first time in 4 years that I’ve not been and had a speaking spot…. Rambling about speech was going to change the world.

Oh well…. Life moves on.

This is probably the last time for awhile I’ll focus on blogging about Speech, VoiceXML, CCXML and SIP for while. I’ve started a new venture with a couple of buddies from Vocalocity called Hakano. It’s not yet ready and we’re hoping to launch a private beta in September. I hope that we can start blogging about it in the next 2 weeks and start showing some private screenshots and screencasts of the next big thing. I can’t wait. Until, then…..

Technorati Tags: speech, eicon, dialogic, intel, cantata,microsoft

If you have not already heard, today ZiVva annouced the acquisition of Vocalocity. You can read the press release to get a little more information.

This does mark the end to my involvement with Vocalocity. It is a very bitter sweet ending. I would like to thank Jim White of Sutter Hill Ventures, Mike von Grey of Revenue Med, Kelly Conway of eLoyalty, Sig Mosely of Imlay Investments, Said Mohammadioun, Lou Santora and all the other close advisors of the company, employees and investors – and most of all, I would like to thank Mike Dickerson, my partner and loyal friend for 5 tough and rewarding years at Vocalocity. I will forever be indebted to you and all the people that made Vocalocity a success.

At Vocalocity, we had the concept of taking complex and ever changing communications standards such as VoiceXML, CCXML and SIP, to name a few, and making software that completely followed the standard and that was available on an OEM basis to larger customers. To name a few: Microsoft, IBM, Aspect and Siemens. We also strongly believed that standards in the communications world would completely disrupt their proprietary cousins, over time. Time being the operative word. Standards have taken over, but at at rate that is hard to track. SIP has become so mainstream that some of the largest carriers in the world are using it natively. VoiceXML has completely taken over the IVR and next generation interactive voice application space. MRCP is now the de-facto specification for interfacing with a speech server.

However, standards also have competition – not just from big companies like Microsoft who sometimes choose not to follow them (or better, extend and embrace them). For example, Skype is the world’s largest VoIP network – and they don’t use SIP – at least not natively. And you can’t say that’s because they have a legacy application problem – they’re somewhat a new company dispite their size.

Some of the frustration that I always felt as part of my involvement in the standards process is that they move too slow. Slow on purpose, I understand. But sometimes, too slow for any good. Technology is evolving at a breakneck pace – and standards need to evolve on a more practical timeframe, not a timeframe that is suitable for a large research organization. The IETF is quite dramatically different than the W3C in this regard. While the W3C moves like a glacier, the IETF moves like a startup. IETF drafts expire every 6 months, forcing momentum. But causing lots of drafts that sometimes have not much change. On the other hand, how many different SIP extension drafts exist? A lot and that causes some fragmentation.

I don’t claim to have any answers or even plausible suggestions – even after 4 years of standards work. But, it needs to be examined.

To all the former employees of Vocalocity, you’ll always be near and dear to my heart for your hard work, dedication and friendship. I wish everyone the best of luck in the future and hope we can work together again. Please keep in touch.

Technorati Tags: vocalocity, zivva, voicexml, ccxml, sip, ietf, w3c, mrcp

My wife tonight used a neat, new service from a company called Unwired Buyer.

It works like this:

1. Create an account at https://www.unwiredbuyer.com/ and setup your ebay id. You pick a 4-digit pin when you sign up.
2. 3 minutes before your auction ends, you’ll get a call on your mobile phone (or whatever phone you setup) – it will ask you to enter your pin.
3. The service will tell you if you’re the highest bidder, and if not, will allow you to continue bidding over the phone until the auction ends. You can remain on the phone while the bid continues.

I think this is yet another great example of Web2.0 + Voice convergence. Nobody will think of this as an IVR application. However, it’s very sexy, uses all the same technology and actually solves a real problem with immediacy.

My belief is that we will see a lot of these types of applications over the next few years as the phone continues to be the predominant personal communication device. Smart services will continue to flurish and they will get more sophisticated, more natural and will start to mix presence, location awareness, workflow and personalization.

Technorati Tags: ebay, unwired, voice, ivr, web2.0

It seems a number of people have blogged and more accurately, speculated, about what VoiceXML means to Microsoft and how it came to be. I’ve also seen some funny posts like “the Unveil acquisition prompted it”. I’m sure everyone has their opinion. Regardless of how it came to be, I’m happy to see Microsoft adopt another W3C standard like VoiceXML. VoiceXML has certainly received mass adoption with companies like Tellme, Nuance, Voxeo and IBM pushing it – just to scratch the surface. But I think the Microsoft adoption announcement really helps put VoiceXML into the mainstream – while SALT was interesting for a few minutes, VoiceXML really has the traction and maturity in the industry. I’ve been asked a lot lately more details about Vocalocity’s involvement. I’m restricted in what I can say and certainly what I can blog about … the Vocalocity press release explains a little bit of the story. Of course, a good bit is untold and you’ll have to wait and see.

The world’s greatest speech application has been destroyed.

OK, that’s an overly dramatic headline – but it’s partially true. I’m really disappointed that yes.com decided to change their incredible speech app, yes, to something overly unimpressive. Normally, a well designed VUI that uses DTMF is perfectly okay to me. However, I think yes proved that a well written speech application VUI can be very incredible. The newest version is sooo lame, it’s almost illegal. Why would anyone use this service now? These guys should just shut the service down at this point.

Fonality announces 20 million calls on Asterisk

Fonality today issued a press release saying that they had achieved 20 million calls on their Asterisk-based platform. Good for them. I think what Asterisk and companies like Fonality prove is that telephony sucks – and the world of telephony is all about good applications and not proprietary hardware and systems. I believe SMB customers are starving for simple, quality applications – even one’s that are non-speech enabled – at something cost affordable.

Voice2.0

However, the macro picture as I have preached about for 5 years is that the trend is moving from hardward boxes to smart software applications – and from proprietary to standards. People are simple sick of lock-in – but beyond that, the larger whole is increased as people mashup different technologies into compelling applications. We’re seeing this in Web2.0 all over the place every day. We’ve not really seen this in the Voice world yet – however, I think that it’s coming. I think the combination of Web2.0 and Voice2.0 is around the corner and Voice2.0 is going to be about replacing everyday communcation tasks with one’s which are based on standards and software – and as easy as Web2.0. Voice2.0 however is still some ways away in my opinion. Why? Goto a site like technorati and see how many people are blogging about VoiceXML, CCXML and MRCP. Very little. The fact that the blogosphere has not picked up on these standards I believe is quite telling. Now google asterisk or Skype. Entire business models and startup businesses (and large existing companies) have adopted these 2 technologies. Skype is probably the largest VoIP network in the world – but one based entirely on a proprietary implementation, not based on the widely adopted SIP protocol. Asterisk is based on SIP (among other protocols like ISDN) and is open source. Certainly both Skype and Asterisk are not in the same realm as VoiceXML and MRCP – and that’s part of the really interesting opportunity in my opinion. But they represent two incredibly successful businesses and technologies that have taken the communications world by storm overnight. I think more is coming that’s incredibly more compelling, and open.

SIP Servlets Specification TCK Woes

It seems like the new JSR-289 expert group has been formed for SIP Servlets 1.1 – but I really wish someone would fix the fact that the TCK site cannot be accessed anymore for JSR-116. I’ve emailed the JCP Board, JSR-116 spec lead and the JSR-116 mailing list over the past week and not one response to my requests to obtain the TCK. I think it’s very irresponsible for JCP (and Sun) to not have the TCK accessible based on what their license stipulates. How can one obtain conformance without access to the TCK?

Technorati Tags: voicexml, microsoft, speech, sip, servlet, asterisk, jsr116, jsr239, voxeo, tellme, fonality, voice2.0

Using state charts or modeling tools like UML aren’t really anything new – part of developing a VoiceXML, CCXML or SIP application these days is about managing and coordinate states. It’s not always fun, can be largely redundant and causes wicked, hard to find bugs in application development.

The W3C Voice Browser Working Group is working on a new programming language called State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction (SCXML) which is modeled after Harel State Charts. Jim Barnett of Aspect Software is the lead Editor and an extremely bright individual.

Lots of the core language of the VoiceXML FIA and the CCXML EHIA is largely driven by state. CCXML itself is really a state machine application. The VoiceXML application you typically would author is really no more than a finite state machine, at least at this point in the evolution of modern dialog systems. So, why SCXML and how is it affecting VXML and CCXML? SCXML is an attempt to refactor part of the common capabilities and requirements of the language into another language that is common and specific to this cause. A good reason to refactor. Also, VoiceXML 3.0 will have additional requirements and having an ability to mix CCXML and VoiceXML applications using a unified state representation allows better applications, more modular applications and applications which can focus on the domain rather than the form.

Enter a new (yet old) player in the area: AT&T and Call Advantage. They have years of experience working in the real world building a very complex SIP based system which is not your grandfather’s phone system. They have recently introduced the results of their research in a new project called echarts. What’s interesting here is that there is a lot to learn from their experience building highly state driven, very dynamic features in SIP. There system has allowed them to layer sophisticated feature interaction and do it in a way which scales in a large environment with many subscribers.

We should look at how we can leverage their work as part of SCXML.

IPSwap is another idea that seems to be starting to make a lot of sense in the global software community. With modular software component frameworks and professional open source (a term coined by Marc Fluery, founder of JBoss), the ability to basically reach into the entire army of world developers to build software makes sense.

While lots of companies are reaching to outsourcing all their development to India, China and other regions — it seems like “swap meet meets software” starts to make more since. There are lots of other people trying to do this — but how about doing this for Voice Applications such as VoiceXML apps? Voice applications can be modular (using a variety of mechanisms such as or in 2.1) and potentially offer a way of buying, trading or selling packaged VUI components.