VoiceBuilder: A Framework for Automatic Speech Application Development

Abstract

In this paper we present VoiceBuilder, a framework for automating the process of developing speech applications. Our framework allows speech User Interface (UI) specialists to introduce UI's in two ways: a stand-alone GUI application, and a web-based interface; in which speech UI's are stored in a markup language previously proposed called SUIML [1], supporting either system initiative or mixed initiative dialogue strategies. For automatic coding, we propose an algorithm based on a macro-processor that generates VoiceXML code by parsing SUIML documents. This algorithm was designed to generate various kinds of code with a minimal initial effort. We performed experiments considering both system initiative and mixed initiative dialogue strategies with three different speech applications: auto-attendant, e-mail reader, and flight reservations. VoiceBuilder is very useful for building speech applications in new domains, requires no programming effort and could be incorporated into several voice toolkits