Simple Voice Greeting card
Let’s begin the introduction to VoiceXML with a simple example application: a voice greeting card that you might want to customize for a friend or relative. In upcoming articles we’ll expand our knowledge of VoiceXML with more complex applications. But for now, let’s start simply with a voice birthday greeting.
Listing 1 Simple VoiceXML greeting card
1 <vxml version = "2.0" > 2 <form> 3 <block> 4 Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you. 5 Happy Birthday from an electronic friend. 6 Happy Birthday to you. <break/> Have a fabulous birthday 7 </block> 8 </form> 9 </vxml>
In line 1, you see the top-level vxml element that is required for all vxml documents. The vxml element contains a single form element. The form element is the vxml workhorse element that is found in practically every vxml document. In this example, the form contains a single block element containing the happy birthday text that the VoiceXML server will convert to speech.
When working with text-to-speech, it’s important to remember that the speech synthesizer cannot insert meaningful pauses unless prompted to do so. In VoiceXML, the appearance of a comma or period in the text will result in a slight pause. Finer control is possible with the insertion of a <break/>, as in line 6. To orchestrate a pause of a specific duration, provide a time attribute to specify a pause in milliseconds.
For example, results in a speech break of 200 milliseconds:
<break time="200"/>
The break element also supports qualitative options of small (500 msecs), medium (1 second), and large (2 seconds), as in the following:
<break strength="medium"/>
The insertion of breaks goes a long way toward making a synthesized voice sound very human.