Evaluation of Voice-driven Web Application Architecture

This paper quantifies the implications and trade-offs of three different architectures for voice driven web application, architectures are implemented as prototypes. The prototypes differ from each other by either using recording, or Text To Speech (TTS) as server based, or TTS as client based to process output speech. A typical application used in this paper, is the most dynamic weather information source which is presented as web feeds or Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. The evaluated quality attributes are performance, maintainability, and development effort. The empirical results show that, each system´s architecture has a different quality profile, for instance, one architecture has the lowest development time but the highest maintainability cost, and another has the lowest bandwidth requirements but the highest development cost. Finally, suggestions about optimal choice of system architecture according to the quality requirements of the final system are drawn.