With age comes responsibility, an adage the Voice Extensible Markup
Language (VXML) Forum is taking to heart with the launch of a
certification track to begin next year.
The organization will start a pilot program today to test out the
certification process — implemented by the forum’s compliance committee
and executed by CT Labs — and iron out any wrinkles in the program
before opening the doors to all companies.
All testing criteria went through the Voice XML Forum compliance
committee before a test bed was put in place by CT Labs. While the pilot
program is expected to take longer, officials expect the certification
process to last no more than a month, depending on the compliance
footwork done by the company before sending the application in for
testing.
The Voice XML Forum’s Web site will feature a free download for anyone
who wants a glimpse into the test suite. Filled with roughly 700
individual test programs, if companies run their platform through the
test suite before sending it in to CT Labs, the certification process
can be shaved down to a couple weeks, officials said.
Vocalocity, VoiceGenie and voxpilot will each put one of their upcoming
applications through the certification process, which will ensure the
software is compliant with VXML 2.0, the standard adopted by the World
Wide Web Consortium.
According to Ken Rehor, Voice XML Forum compliance committee chair, a
certification process is beneficial both to the industry and to
customers who are looking for a product that works as advertised.
“We want to make sure that when platform vendors, and eventually tool
and application developers, talk about specifications they have a common
basis — it removes the question of ‘what exactly did you implement?’ he
said. “What customers are asking for is independent verification
because vendors can and have claimed anything. We want everyone to have
a common understanding of what the standard is.”
Rehor said companies don’t need to be members of the Voice XML Forum to
participate in the certification process, or to even to download and use
the test suite.
“One of the main benefits of this is simply to have everyone on the same
page,” he said.
Rehor declined to comment on the price tag for the certification
process, saying the group was still working out the details.
The Voice XML Forum has been making strides the past year to expand on
the original charter and goals of the organization created by IBM , Lucent Technologies
, AT&T
and
Motorola .
Once it became clear the specification would become a standard — Voice
XML is used for hundreds of millions of phone calls every day and is
currently in the candidate recommendation stage, which is two steps
prior to complete adoption as a standard by the W3C — it took on
statesman-like qualities.
Earlier this year, the organization started up the developer
certification process, a program to ensure the people coding the lines
all had a baseline competency; it’s a program similar to the Microsoft
Certified Systems Engineer or Cisco
Certified Network Engineer tracks.
The founding fathers, if you will, also opened up its boardroom to other
companies. Last week, it welcomed VoiceGenie, Hewlett-Packard , Nuance
and West Corp.
as board members, who will work with the original four to steer the
standard’s course in the future.
