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Introduction to CCXML: call control for VoiceXML applications. (VoiceXML).

Article Excerpt
When building interactive voice recognition applications, we are inevitably faced with the challenge of providing advanced telephony call-control capabilities. In some scenarios we'd like to bridge two calls for a conferencing application, in others we'd like to provide basic call routing so the caller can be connected to an appropriate customer service agent, make outbound calls, and the like. VoiceXML doesn't really provide these advanced call-control and telephony features.

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What's available in VoiceXML is a simple "transfer" element that can be used to connect a VoiceXML application with another phone number/voice application. However, by definition it wasn't meant to provide the sophisticated call-control capabilities.

Introducing CCXML

Call Control eXtensible Markup language (CCXML), as the name suggests, is an XML-based markup language that provides rich telephony call-control capabilities to an interactive speech application. Whereas the VoiceXML standard is focused primarily on providing semantics for representing conversational dialogs, CCXML provides the much-needed, sophisticated, event-based asynchronous call-control mechanism and tighter integration with the telephony platform.

CCXML and VoiceXML are totally complementary standards. Also, they aren't dependent on each other. For instance, CCXML isn't restricted to VoiceXML; it could be used in the context of other dialog languages (or even without one if the application requires only call routing capabilities). Similarly, VoiceXML could utilize other call-control semantics. The whole idea is...

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