Speaking of Standards

We are very pleased to see today that the W3C has published CCXML (Call Control XML) as a formal “Recommendation“. Within the W3C standards process, this is the the highest level that a standard can attain and is the result of a great amount of work by a great number of people over many years. To celebrate, we have :

• issued a news release celebrating the milestone and discussing Voxeo’s involvement and our use of CCXML within our products; and
• created a CCXML Resource page where you can find links to CCXML-related tutorials, white papers, source code and more.

As the news release mentions, Voxeo’s CTO RJ Auburn has been involved with CCXML since the early days and is the chair of the CCXML working group within the W3C. Voxeo’s Dan Burnett is now the chair of the overall Voice Browser Working Group under which CCXML and VoiceXML fall. Voxeo Prophecy was the first commercial implementation of CCXML, was the first (and remains the only) engine to support 100% of the CCXML specification and pass the entire W3C test suite for CCXML, and has been licensed out by other companies looking to include CCXML inside their products and services.

We are delighted to see this formal step in the W3C standards process and look forward to seeing even more applications being built out there that use the power of CCXML!

Yesterday the W3C published a Proposed Recommendation for “Voice Browser Call Control: CCXML Version 1.0” and also asked for any final comments to be received by June 10, 2011. The CCXML Proposed Recommendation can be found at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/PR-ccxml-20110510/

The list of changes in the proposed recommendation is at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/PR-ccxml-20110510/#changes-pr

and the W3C has very helpfully provided a diff version showing the changes from the past revision.

Given that Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn is the Editor-in-Chief of the CCXML specification and that we do quite a good bit with CCXML (and indeed many other folks in the industry actually license our CCXML engine to use in their products), we’re very pleased to see this Proposed Recommendation come out. Within the W3C process, this is nearing the final stage where CCXML will become a full “Recommendation”. Kudos to RJ and all the folks involved with the W3C Voice Browser Working Group for moving the specification along to where it is.

If you have never worked with CCXML, we have a lengthy set of CCXML tutorials over on our documentation site and have also written a good bit about CCXML over the years on our Voxeo Developers Corner blog. If you aren’t familiar with “state machines”, you might want to start with the post I wrote about state machines and CCXML (and James Bond) as that may help explain a bit about how CCXML works.

You can of course try out CCXML for free either in our hosted Evolution developer portal or by downloading Prophecy to your local system (for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X).

At SpeechTEK in New York City a few weeks ago, our own Dan Burnett was recognized by Speech Tech Magazine as one of the “2008 Speech Luminaries” for all his years of work on industry standards relating to speech. We were delighted for Dan to receive the (well-deserved!) recognition and I had a chance to record a brief video interview with Dan at SpeechTEK:

As Dan mentions, he is Director of Speech Technologies in our Office of the CTO (OCTO) reporting in to our CTO, RJ Auburn, and is responsible for looking at how to constantly improve our speech recognition technology and also ensure it is compliant with standards.

Congratulations, Dan, on the recognition by Speech Technology Magazine!

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P.S. And yes, for those following along at home, Dan Burnett and I were both hired into the OCTO at about the same time… we thought about instituting a rule where all new OCTO employees had to be named “Dan”, but thankfully that rule was ignored with the recent excellent addition of Wei Chen!

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