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GotXSLT? Part 3 of 5: transform an XML example to speech. (XSLT tutorial).

Article Excerpt
GotXSLT?

Someday soon you'll be able to tell the Internet what you're interested in and have it respond with the information you need. You could instruct a Web site to monitor traffic reports, for example, then tell it where you're heading. If there's a traffic jam, the Web site will dial your cell phone to alert you and suggest an alternate route.

VoiceXML is the technology that will make this happen.

In Parts 1 and 2 of this series (XML-J, Vol. 2, issues 10, 11) I briefly discussed how to transform an XML document into HTML (Web) using client-side transformation with Internet Explorer 5.0 and using XSLT to transform an XML document into WML (WAP).

In this tutorial I'll discuss how, using the same framework we developed in Part 2, XSLT can transform our XML example to VoiceXML (speech). The primary purpose of the tutorial, however, is to introduce the following:

* The basics of VoiceXML 2.0

* The use of XSLT to transform XML to VoiceXML

Since this is only a very basic introduction to VoiceXML, we won't be focusing on developing VoiceXML applications, but rather the transformation. In fact, the resultant VoiceXML is a very simple document that doesn't prompt the user for any inputs. If you want to lean more about VoiceXML 2.0 and how to develop advanced features, please check the Resources section at the end of this tutorial.

What Is VoiceXML?

VoiceXML is an XML-based markup language that defines a spoken dialog just as HTML defines a graphical Web page. It was developed by the VoiceXML Forum as a consolidation of several proprietary formats developed earlier by the forum founders -- AT&T, IBM, Lucent, and Motorola. The VoiceXML 1.0 specification was published in March 2000. It did not, however, define speech grammar or audio format, leaving this to each vendor to implement, thus limiting the ease of portability of VoiceXML applications. Actually, I developed a few 100% VoiceXML 1.0-compliant applications using one of the voice vendors but they wouldn't work on another voice vendor. Talk about defeating the purpose of having specifications!

Fortunately, on October 23, 2001, the World Wide Web Consortium published the VoiceXML...

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