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Some debates are so historic and complex they will never be resolved - storied arguments destined to be passed down from generation to generation, epic disputes that will outlive us all: liberalism versus conservatism, capitalism versus socialism, prolife versus pro-choice, Coke versus Pepsi, the Yankees versus the Red Sox, tastes great versus less filling.
In the world of speech technology, an ongoing dispute about voice user interface (VUI) design standards and universal commands rages on with just as much furor. And while the debate about the value and necessity of VUI standards and universal commands will not likely be resolved any time in the near future, the landscape of the speech industry is always changing, and with it, the factors and dynamics that surround the creation and assessment of standards are changing as well.
With a chorus of differing voices some louder and more strident than others - the speech industry finds itself with few answers and a host of questions about the issue of standards: What should these standards look like? How should they be determined? Who should determine them? How would they be enforced? How would they evolve over time?
On a very basic level, the lack of a regulatory organization prevents the creation of any true VUI design standard, according to Jim Larson, an independent consultant, VoiceXML trainer, and cochair of the World Wide Web Consortium's Voice Browser Working Group.
"There is not a standards group to specify what these standards might be and bless these as official standards that everybody ought to follow," says Larson, who notes that vendors also fail to agree on the necessity of standards. "The VoiceXML Forum has never suggested that there ought to be standard voice user interface guidelines. AVIOS has internally talked about it, but has never done anything. The lack of a standards body is the primary [reason] why we don't have any official standards."
Larson points to the Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD), an organization formed less than a year ago out of an informal voice user interface designers' group at Yahoo!, and Bruce Balentine's books as good sources of informal guidelines and best practices, but stresses that none of these are hard and fast recommendations or industry standards.
Larson readily...