ISCA Archive Interspeech 2004
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2004

Voicebuilder: a framework for automatic speech application development

Miguel Angel Rodriguez-Moreno, Heriberto Cuayahuitl, Juventino Montiel-Hernandez

In this paper we present VoiceBuilder, a framework for automating the process of developing speech applications. For such purpose, our framework allows speech User Interface (UI) specialists to introduce UIs in two ways: a stand-alone GUI application, and a web-based interface; in which speech UIs are stored in 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 through 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. This framework is very useful for building speech applications in new domains with no programming effort and could be incorporated into several voice toolkits.