The software has become more efficient, and the cost of processing power and memory has dropped. Third, the development of dialog-based applications has become less of an art form. Some systems are available as turnkey systems, and development tools are embodying the lessons learned from deployed systems. Speech recognition is essentially a software technology. A standard telephone interface card is required to connect to phone lines, answer the call and handle call processing.
Developers can create their own platform from components or buy a full platform.
The Forum has issued a preliminary specification and plans to submit a final specification to the World Wide Web Consortium for consideration as an Internet standard. The major goal of VoiceXML is to bring the advantages of Web-based development and content delivery to interactive voice response applications. From the Web designer's viewpoint, access to an organization's information by phone is possible simply by creating a description in VoiceXML and storing it on the site. No speech recognition hardware or software is required. VoiceXML is downloaded to the voice browser much as HTML is downloaded to a visual browser.