EVITA-RAD: an extensible enterprise voice porTAI - rapid application development tool

Speech interactivity and call automation technology has reached a point of reliability sufficient for deployment at the enterprise level. Even though Voice User Interface (VUI) applications are growing in popularity, the development process remains a bottleneck to its widespread adoptation. Currently available development tools are meant for either professionals or programmers experienced in VoiceXML, speech recognition, dialogue design, and platform specific languages. We present a web-based tool, EVITA-RAD, driven by an extensible and modular design paradigm for building dialogues. By incorporating database access and abstracting many issues of programming in VoiceXML into modules, our tool allows users to focus on designing dynamic and useful dialogue applications. Thus, EVITARAD lowers the barrier of entry for VUI application development, and helps promote widespread adoption of VUI applications.