State-, HTML-, and Object-Based Dialog Design for Voice-Web Applications

The user’s interaction with internet information services is usually based on dealing with a graphical interface, but because of the improvements in speech technology over the last years more and more phone speech information services appear. In March 2004 the W3C published the VoiceXML 2.0 recommendation to bring the advantages of web-based development and content delivery to interactive voice response information systems. Although classical modeling strategies for building graphical user interfaces can also be used for their voice based counterparts, there are certain aspects where voice response systems need special attention. For example, an intuitive navigation structure is crucial due to limited possibilities in expressing information to the user. We present a systematic development process which integrates conceptual modeling, rapid prototyping, simulation and system documentation for voice based information services. Following this approach we have implemented a voice based interface for an e-Democracy portal which will be used as an example within this paper.