W3C Advances the VoiceXML 2.1 Specification to Candidate Recommendation

Voice XML 2.0 has enabled the deployment of voice applications that handle millions of phone calls every day. This has led to the development of additional, innovative features that help developers build voice-activated services. While it was too late to incorporate these additional features into VoiceXML 2.0, many of these features have been incorporated into VoiceXML 2.1.  VoiceXML 2.1 specifies a set of new features commonly implemented by Voice Extensible Markup Language platforms. This specification is designed to be backwards-compatible with VoiceXML 2.0. 

On June 13, the W3C published the VoiceXML 2.1 specification as a Candidate Recommendation to indicate that the document is believed to be stable and to encourage implementation by the developer community.  New features include dynamic reference to grammars and scripts, the <mark> element to detect barge-in, the data <data> element to fetch data from the server, dynamic concatenation of prompts, and a new type of transfer.  The VoiceXML 2.1 specification is available from the W3C Voice Browser Working Group Web site at http://www.w3.org/Voice/.