Oracle gives developers the word

Oracle is planning to voice-enable all of its own applications, as well as its Oracle 9i Application Server (9iAS), to allow developers to build applications that can retrieve information via a landline or wireless voice links, as well as through the internet.

Primarily, Oracle is focused on its 9iAS with which it intends to offer an interface that is independent of any vendor's voice gateway product.

The company has teamed up with a number of speech recognition technology manufacturers to create and integrate voice-enabled services with its software, including IBM, Nuance and SpeechWorks.

In addition, Oracle is working with these companies on server hardware, in regards to adding in speech processor boards that use digital signals processing chips for automatic speech recognition, speech-to-text and text-to-speech.

Oracle stated by enabling the application server with speech recognition technology, will avoid the need to write a proprietary platform.

Presently developers are required to create a voice-enabled platform for a particular portal using the development platform from that supplier.