A voice browser is a

software application Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

that presents an interactive

voice user interface A voice-user interface (VUI) makes spoken human interaction with computers possible, using speech recognition to understand spoken commands and answer questions, and typically text to speech to play a reply. A voice command device is a device con ...

to the user in a manner analogous to the functioning of a

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

interpreting

Hypertext Markup Language The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript ...

(HTML). Dialog documents interpreted by voice browser are often encoded in standards-based markup languages, such as Voice Dialog Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML), a standard by the

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working ...

. A voice browser presents information aurally, using pre-recorded audio file playback or

text-to-speech Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal langua ...

synthesis software. A voice browser obtains information using

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ...

and keypad entry, such as

DTMF Dual-tone multi-frequency signaling (DTMF) is a telecommunication signaling system using the voice-frequency band over telephone lines between telephone equipment and other communications devices and switching centers. DTMF was first developed ...

detection. As speech recognition and web technologies have matured, voice applications are deployed commercially in many industries and voice browsers are supplanting traditional proprietary

interactive voice response Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows telephone users to interact with a computer-operated telephone system through the use of voice and DTMF tones input with a keypad. In telecommunications, IVR allows customers to interac ...

(IVR) systems. Voice browser software is delivered in a variety of implementations models. Systems that present a voice browser to a user, typically provide interfaces to the public switched telephone network or to a private branch exchange.

External links

W3C's list of VoiceXML browsers

Ken Rehor's VoiceXML platform list
* VoiceXML Forum
W3C Voice Browser Working Group

Voximal the VoiceXML Browser for Asterisk PBX
* VoiceXML Development Guide * Voice Browsing IE Toolbar by Yan Michalevsky
Project metalmouth - Developing an open source voice browser extension for Chrome
Web browsers Speech synthesis

See also

External links