RJ Auburn - One Step Beyond

Today I am off to France for the W3C meeting. Tuesday will be the CCXML group’s face to face meeting and we hope to make some good progress on getting the Last Call Working Draft ready for public consumption.

I hope my battery lasts on the flight so I can finish up the giant list of editing that need to be done. I really should have flown on American instead of United as they are now offering power ports in most of the cheap seats. United only seems to be offering it in business and first class and I have been told at checkin that my chance of being upgraded is about the same as winning the lottery ;-)

It’s amazing the amount of small changes a spec like this needs before it gets published. I hope to be able to meet up with some of the other editors at the W3C meeting to see what tactics they use to manage a spec like this. Keeping track of all the changes from everyone ad getting everything merged cleanly is quite a task.

It looks like IBM is joining the growing list of companies that offer CCXML platforms.

Voxeo of course has supported CCXML from the very first working draft and has run millions and millions of calls on our platform as it’s been the core of our Voice Center for the last 3 years. We also support integration with several VoiceXML browsers.

O’Reilly has a good article covering the basics of tuning a production squid http caching server. These are things that if you have never run a production squid cluster before can be good to know as a number of them can bite you if you don’t take them into consideration.

One thing thats not covered in that article is that squid is for the most part not SMP aware. If you are going to deploy a squid server on a dual cpu box you really want to keep in mind that you may need to run two instances on different ports/ip’s to get the full capacity from your server.

A big congratulations are in order for Jeff Pulver and the rest of the Free World Dialup team. The FCC just approved(PDF) their petition that will help keep Voice over IP free of regulation in the US.

There has been a lot of talk in the industry on regulation of VoIP in the last few months. InfoWorld just had a story on this covering comments made by Jeffrey Citron the CEO of Vonage.

Jeff Pulver has covered this many times and his Petition for his Free World Dialup network is going to be reviewed by the FCC on February 12th.

These next few months are going to be very interesting as the regulation of this gets sorted out.

Oliver Drobnik just posted a short sound byte from Bill Gates about Microsoft’s plans for speech recognition and synthesis in upcoming windows versions along with some comments about the upcoming Speech Server product. It sounds like Microsoft is investing a lot of time and money in this field and it will be exciting to see what comes out of it and how the other people in the market adapt.

The VoiceXML Forum just announced the release of the X+V 1.2 specification for developing multi-modal applications with VoiceXML.

X+V is the VoiceXML Forum’s proposal for supporting multi-modal applications by embedding the VoiceXML 2.0 language inside XHTML allowing web developers to take advantage of the existing web standards.

The W3C’s multi-modal working group is looking at X+V as the basis for their upcoming standards for multi-modal applications. Additionally Microsoft and the SALT Forum have proposed Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) and an alternative.

Nuance Communications is getting closer to turning a profit. The loss for the last quarter was only about $200K compared to over $5M for the same Q last year. More good signs for the speech industry!

As a member of the W3C working group I am glad to be able to announce that after many years
VoiceXML has finally hit “Proposed Recommendation” status. Assuming it passes the AC vote (there is no reason it should not) it will become a full Recommendation in the next month or so. The press release has all the details so check it out!