Is there a JAVA API for VoiceXML?
If there isnt, what is the best way to approach
the porblem of developing VoiceXML based applications?
VoiceXML is a markup language, just like HTML. So you develop VoiceXML
applications in VoiceXML.
Of course you can use Servlets or JSP to *output* VoiceXML, just like
you can with HTML (ie., you usually run your VoiceXML application on a
web server). But there's no standard Java API to use VoiceXML does
directly from Java -- somewhere along the line you're just outputting a
web page and then getting responses back with HTTP GET/POST requests.
Indeed, it seems like most VoiceXML applications are based in
server-side languages like JSP, PHP, ASP, Servlets, etc.
If you pay for a commercial VoiceXML engine from a company like Nuance,
you might get access to a Java back-end API -- but it wouldn't be
VoiceXML, per se.
You might look at the Java Speech API (JSAPI), but I don't know of any
free implementations. There's a JSAPI version 2 specification in
development (
http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=113) but it doesn't
look like that's ready for public consumption yet either. (These
aren't VoiceXML at all but would let you use speech in your client-side
Java applications.)
And of course you can read some tutorial's on the VoiceXML vendors' websites:
http://cafe.bevocal.com/
http://developer.voicegenie.com/
http://studio.tellme.com/
(... and probably others)
HTH