Skip to main content
 

Voice Tools Project

Introduction

The Voice Tools Project is a proposed open source project under the Eclipse Technology Project.

This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process document) and is written to declare its intent and scope. This proposal is written to solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. You are invited to comment on and/or join the project. Please send all feedback to the http://www.eclipse.org/newsportal/thread.php?group=eclipse.technology.voicetools newsgroup.

Background

The Eclipse open source project has been been exceptionally successful and established Eclipse as a de facto standard IDE platform and world class IDE. To date, focus has been on tools for Java application development. With recent proposals, Eclipse is growing into the Web application, J2EE, and embedded application spaces.

This project proposal serves to take Eclipse into the voice application space. These tools can be used to develop interactive voice response (IVR) systems based on VoiceXML standards, such as speech-driven applications for performing bank transfers, retrieving e-mail, or querying flight information over the phone

Description

The Voice Tools Technology Project will focus on Voice Application tools in the JSP/J2EE space, based on W3C standards, so that these standards become dominant in voice application development.  It will depend on and extend the XML and Web development capabilities of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project (/webtools/index.html.)   Voice Tools will be a set of Eclipse plugins that will provide development tools for W3C Standards/Recommendations for Voice application markup.

Initially, Voice Tools will consist of editors for VoiceXML, the XML Form of SRGS (Speech Recognition Grammar Specification), and CCXML (Call Control eXtensible Markup Language).  Implementations of other tools that implement W3C voice standards, such as the LexiconML (Pronunciation Markup Language), will be added as the standards solidify and the Voice Tools Eclipse community grows.

The Voice Tools editors will be extensions of the SSE(Structured Source Editor) from the Web Tools Platform Project, and will have the capability of syntactical validation and content-assistance of the markup tags for each of the W3C standards.  The DTD (Document Type Description) for the standard markup will be used to perform these functions, and the user will have the ability to choose the DTD from a preference page associated to each of the markup editors.  In addition, a new file wizard will be provided for each markup type, to create an "empty" file based on the required markup defined by the chosen DTD.

Organization

We propose this project should be undertaken as a Technology project rather than part of the Eclipse Platform or Web Tools Platform projects. Being a Technology project gives it room to experiment without disruption to other Eclipse Platform or Web Tools Platform development work.

Because Technology projects are not meant to be ongoing, we see this project eventually becoming a project under the Web Tools Platform Project.  This would happen once this work matures and the Web Tools Platform Project gets up and running.

Initial Committers
The following companies will contribute committers to get the project started:

Critical to the success of this project is participation of developers in the voice application development community. We hope this proposal phase will result in additional interest and participation from the community.


Back to the top