Making the VoiceWeb smarter - integrating intelligent component technologies and VoiceXML

VoiceXML offers the prospect of a streamlined deployment process of voice interfaces for commercial applications, similar to the ease of Web development. This in turn promises increased dynamism in the field of speech and language research. We investigate opportunities and constraints for the integration of intelligent component technologies into VoiceXML-based systems: such components will solve tasks from both sides of natural language processing, natural language understanding/analysis as well as natural language generation. We ask what role these fields originating from AI research will play in the VoiceXML environment. For a more detailed report including also the issues of multilinguality and natural language interfaces see (Mittendorfer et al., 2001)