Typically, a provider would need to purchase telephony hardware, develop an application in a proprietary application programming interface, and integrate the application with existing databases. With voice markup, a content provider could develop a voice application using many of the same Web-development tools its programmers already are familiar with, publish the application on an existing Web server, and arrange with a service provider to handle VoiceXML interpretation. Because established Web technologies are used, the integration with back-end databases can be shared with the HTML application. Because the development of the application is separated from its deployment, the content provider will have much more flexibility in deploying the application. For example, one option would be to contract with a service provider until the voice application had proven its worth, and later purchase a VoiceXML platform to own and operate.
Consumers also can realize many advantages from a standardized voice markup language.
First, the ease of deploying new voice applications with the markup approach promises to expand the range of applications accessible from the telephone. Furthermore, once a large number of services are available via the Internet, it becomes possible to interact with several unrelated services during a single phone call. The end result will have the telephony features needed to build sophisticated interactive voice services for business applications, such as call centers, as well as all of the functions needed to provide speech-driven interfaces to all manner of end users. VoiceXML will help deliver voice services from the high-mobility worker on a cellular phone calling the company intranet to get information on a sales prospect to mom calling to get a weather report before sending the kids out for the day. Lucent has demonstrated the use of the markup language approach to create banking and other e-commerce services, a variety of information retrieval services, and interactive communications services.