VoiceXML Forum Names New Board of Directors

The VoiceXML Forum, a global industry trade organization chartered to promote and accelerate the adoption of VoiceXML-based applications, announced today its new board of directors for the 2011-2012 term.

The forum's new board of directors is composed of Bruce Pollock, vice president of strategic growth and planning at West Interactive, (chair); Rob Marchand, senior director of product management at Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, (vice-chair); Val Matula, director of multimedia technologies research at Avaya, (treasurer); Paolo Baggia, director of international standards at Loquendo, and Kevin Chatow, director of product management at Nuance Communications.

"The decision by the above-mentioned companies to participate at the board level demonstrates the tremendous industry support behind the VoiceXML Forum and the importance of VoiceXML," Pollock said.

The VoiceXML Forum also certified the platforms of five companies as complying with the latest release of the forum's VoiceXML 2.1 test suite. These companies include ATS Advanced Technology Solutions [IVR Center 4.0.0.0], Genesys [Genesys 8.1.1], Loquendo [VoxNauta 7.1], Nuance [Nuance 4.0 SP1] and West [Holly 5.0]. Additional testers are in the queue. The VoiceXML Platform Certification Program test suite includes more than 100 tests that cover the World Wide Web Consortium's VoiceXML 2.1 recommendation and is based on the W3C's VoiceXML 2.1 Implementation Report. To aid vendors in preparing for certification, the Conformance Test Suite in the VoiceXML Platform Certification Program is available, at no charge, for public download from the forum's Web site at www.voicexml.org.

"VoiceXML certification promotes cross-vendor interoperability of platforms, tools, and applications, which stabilizes and matures the industry," Pollock said. "This increases confidence that a wide variety of VoiceXML-certified platforms are sound speech technology investments.

"Looking to the future, the VoiceXML Forum is currently working on several new technical initiatives, including a developer testing program and other targeted activities," he added.

Founded in 1999, the VoiceXML Forum's mission is to promote and to accelerate the worldwide adoption of VoiceXML-based applications. The forum serves as an educational and technical resource, a certification authority, and a contributor and liaison to international standards bodies, such as the W3C IETF, ANSI and ISO.