IBM partners support open-source speech initiative

Audium, Fluency, and Openstream contribute Reusable Dialog Components

IBM has consistently supported the movement of telephone speech applications toward standards, modern software practices, and the use of existing open-source solutions. In August, for example, the company supported Avaya’s Voice Portal with its WebSphere Voice Server and Application Server, with the two companies emphasizing the compatibility of the joint solution with a Service Oriented Architecture (reuse of existing Web services, TSN, p. 1, September 2005).

IBM also announced additional support for its Reusable Dialog Component (RDC) initiative in August. RDCs, introduced by IBM in fall 2004, allow developers to plug standard pieces of speech code into their own code using a common format that can be more easily shared. RDCs are Java Server Page (JSP) tags that support dynamic generation of VoiceXML at runtime. Speech dialogs built using RDCs should work together, regardless of the vendor that created them.

IBM partners Audium, Fluency, and Openstream have donated RDCs to the Apache Software Foundation, a community for open-source software development. Based on Java, with tools built on Eclipse, the initiative gives speech developers the benefits of some of the open standards that mainstream software developers have been using. The demonstration of an active community around RDCs has led the Apache Software Foundation to approve moving the RDC project from sandbox status to full project status. 

Openstream, for example, contributed speech components for stock market applications. Companies developing stock or trading applications for the North American Stock Exchanges can use these Reuseable Dialogue Components within the IBM-Apache RDC framework to recognize and confirm company names. Openstream has integrated RDC capability into Openstream’s Smart Messaging Platform. Openstream provides a secure, mobile, multimodal Internet infrastructure platform and applications.

IBM also announced it will offer WebSphere Voice Toolkit components to Audium for inclusion in the next version of Audium Studio, which is based on the Eclipse open-source software development environment. Audium Studio is a voice application environment combining VoiceXML with packaged services for IVR applications. It provides a full set of tools to help developers quickly build voice applications and a framework to create, deploy, and manage large multi-application voice projects.

Fluency provides packaged speech recognition applications for customer self-service solutions, focusing on financial services, utilities, and other verticals. Fluency launched its Virtual Speech Agent (VSA) Suite in August (TSN, p. 12, September 2005).