AVoN calling: AXL for voice-enabled Web navigation

Abstract

The World Wide Web is a rich source of information that has become a universal means of communication. XML promises to be the future of the World Wide Web. However, as HTML is replaced by its more powerful counterpart, traditional browsers are not sufficient to display the information communicated in an XML document. Today's browsers are capable of showing only a textual version of an XML document. This is limiting not only for a viewer in a traditional scenario, but is a barrier for a user who wishes to access the information without having access to a traditional keyboard, mouse, and monitor. This paper presents a framework for developing non-traditional, schema-driven, customizable interfaces used to navigate and modify XML documents that may be served over the Web. Our system, Audio XmL (AXL) focuses on developing a speech-based component within that framework. At the most basic level, we provide a Speech DOM, a spoken equivalent to the Document Object Model. Beyond that, we provide an intuitive set of commands based upon schema as well as a customization language. AXL enables voice-based Web browsing, but without requiring extra effort on the part of the Web page designer. Given any XML document, AXL alows the user to navigate, modify and traverse the structure and links of the document entirely by voice. To illustrate, we focus on how AXL can enable a user to browse the Web via a cellular phone.