Definitive VoiceXML

Rating:
Summary: Superior book on VoiceXML and Voice Technologies
Review: I seldom write reviews for books on Amazon, but I just had to do it for this excellent book. This book is by far the best resource for building enterprise caliber voice applications. I have purchased 5 other VXML books and none of them delivers the information that this book does. This book not only delivered the content I needed, but it's comprehensive and deals with complex issues in a simplified fashion. The real highlights of this book are Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 explains Enterprise applications, possible architectures for dealing with state, and interacting with a backend. Chapter 5 deals with more of a deployment and physical architectural angle. Get it for those two chapters alone.

The only thing that I found missing was techniques for versioning a voice application (No not the CVS source-code control type versioning). I mean having the same backend server provide different content to the same voice browser and techniques on structuring your application to smoothly transition from one set of content to another. For example, the voice browser cache is full of old static content - how can I gracefully switch to new content without forcing a dump of the existing cache through the HTTP headers or some other external mechanism - It has to do with using relative pathing beneath the application root document for vxml scripts and static content. Some information about Browser to Browser interactions might also be nice - but I recognize the VBI specs are just emerging.

Anyway, anyone thinking of building a real voice application with speech recognition and integration to backend applications and data should definitely add this book to their library. It has helped me tremendously. Two thumbs up!

Rating:
Summary: Superior book on VoiceXML and Voice Technologies
Review: I seldom write reviews for books on Amazon, but I just had to do it for this excellent book. This book is by far the best resource for building enterprise caliber voice applications. I have purchased 5 other VXML books and none of them delivers the information that this book does. This book not only delivered the content I needed, but it's comprehensive and deals with complex issues in a simplified fashion. The real highlights of this book are Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 explains Enterprise applications, possible architectures for dealing with state, and interacting with a backend. Chapter 5 deals with more of a deployment and physical architectural angle. Get it for those two chapters alone.

The only thing that I found missing was techniques for versioning a voice application (No not the CVS source-code control type versioning). I mean having the same backend server provide different content to the same voice browser and techniques on structuring your application to smoothly transition from one set of content to another. For example, the voice browser cache is full of old static content - how can I gracefully switch to new content without forcing a dump of the existing cache through the HTTP headers or some other external mechanism - It has to do with using relative pathing beneath the application root document for vxml scripts and static content. Some information about Browser to Browser interactions might also be nice - but I recognize the VBI specs are just emerging.

Anyway, anyone thinking of building a real voice application with speech recognition and integration to backend applications and data should definitely add this book to their library. It has helped me tremendously. Two thumbs up!

Rating:
Summary: One of my better tech book buys
Review: This book is really two books in one. A VXML tutorial and an overview of all the technologies used to build voice applications. The authors, in the overview portions, have presented detailed information yet have made it manageable enough to allow the reader to gain a good hold of the material without getting lost in the detail. Where the book really stands out though is in the VXML tutorial. The tutorial is written in a layered fashion in which the basic concepts are presented before moving on to the next more advanced feature. At each step an example is used to help make the concepts concrete. I loved the fact that the authors never underestimate the my intelligence nor did they seek to impress the me with their advanced knowledge. I was very happy to find this in a recently published technical book. I was able to move quickly though the tutorial building on the example presented. I bought the book hoping to come up to speed on new voice application technologies having been out of that field for many years. The book has done that and I consider it one of my better tech book buys.

Rating:
Summary: One of my better tech book buys
Review: This book is really two books in one. A VXML tutorial and an overview of all the technologies used to build voice applications. The authors, in the overview portions, have presented detailed information yet have made it manageable enough to allow the reader to gain a good hold of the material without getting lost in the detail. Where the book really stands out though is in the VXML tutorial. The tutorial is written in a layered fashion in which the basic concepts are presented before moving on to the next more advanced feature. At each step an example is used to help make the concepts concrete. I loved the fact that the authors never underestimate the my intelligence nor did they seek to impress the me with their advanced knowledge. I was very happy to find this in a recently published technical book. I was able to move quickly though the tutorial building on the example presented. I bought the book hoping to come up to speed on new voice application technologies having been out of that field for many years. The book has done that and I consider it one of my better tech book buys.