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Visual VoiceXML / VXML development tool?

Does anyone know of any tools out there that will allow me to run and debug a VXML application visually? There is a ton of VXML development tools, but they all require you to build the application in them.

I have an existing application that uses JSP to generate VXML, and I'm looking for a way to navigate and debug visualized VXML in much the same way that Firebug allows for this using HTML. I have some proxy-like tools that allow me to check the rendered code as it is sent to the VXML browser, but there is a ton of JS that makes it difficult to manually move the code.

Has anyone worked with a product that allows this?

Thanks!
IVR Avenger

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Disclaimer: I am the Voiyager development manager ( www.voiyager.com ), VoiceXML testing tool. This does not meet your criteria, and I do not think that this is the type of tool that you need, but I thought it was worth mentioning it.

As far as I know, there is no such tool for VoiceXML. Actually, there are very few VoiceXML tools on the market, and hardly any of them are testing or analyzing. The manufacturers who created the development tools were all acquired by other companies. Some of them offered various forms of debugging that were specific to their toolbox or remained at the dialogue level (input signal). From your question, I assume that you need lower-level debugging capabilities.

I think the alternative paths are minimal and somewhat complicated. I believe that your main goal is to debug or rewrite an existing application, but you have not set any specific tasks besides JavaScript. Some thoughts or approaches that may help:

  • Isolate JavaScript and put the code in a unit test harness. This will go a long way in understanding the application logic. Any JavaScript encapsulation that you execute is likely to go a long way toward improving code maintenance.
  • Trying to run VoiceXML with an HTML translation layer so you can use FireBug. The biggest problem is with call input (i.e. processing SRGS grammars). Perhaps you could fool it only if the form accepts a JSON string, fills in the field values. There are grammar testing tools on the market. Depending on the nature of your problems, you can use a simple and easy approach and try to deal with this problem only in problem areas.
  • Mark the application with a lot of logging. You can do this using the VoiceXML LOG element or push the variable space back to the server. By adding intermediate forms, you can provide a dump from each VoiceXML Data element.
  • See if your application will work in one of the open source VoiceXML browsers (not sure about the state of the open source browsers that we created and bought for our various products). If you can make it work mostly, you can use a development debugger to provide some ability to go through the logic. Nevertheless, this is probably one of the most difficult ways, since you really need to understand the browser, to know when and where to follow the control points, and to figure out how to set the necessary data.

Good luck with that. If you find a different approach, I would be interested to see it published.

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An alternative debug env is to use something like Asterisk with the voicexml browser plugin, for example, from http://www.voiceglue.org/ or for a limited license, i6net.

You can store all parts separately (a dynamic html and vxml application in php / jsp / j2ee /, tts processing and optional asr processing as separate virtual machines with something like a virtual box. If the logic can be saved the same way, then it's just a matter of change channel based user interface.

A softphone is all you need to call the minimal asterisk machine, which has a voxxml browser with a vxml url in the call plan.

I just used the Zend Framework since php is used in this environment and changed the view suffixes (phtml vs vxml) based on the user-agent string.

Flite for tts is great for debugging, and when your application is ready, you can record phrases, and the ubuntu forums had a page with instructions on how to improve the quality of flirting with some additional audio files.

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Have you tried Eclipse VTP or InVision Studio

  • Eclipse vtp
    This is an Eclipse plugin. But I feel that it is a little unfriendly for users (from a Japanese point of view).

  • InVision Studio * Be sure to create a user account *
    This is an IVR Convergys tool. It should edit the standard VXML mode. (Unfortunately, this is not an exact match.)

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For simple vxml debugging, I use the Nuance Cafe VoiceXML checker. It does not give you a visual tree or anything else, but it is pretty good at detecting syntax errors and is free. I think that they can also have more advanced debugging tools if you look at them, but I didn’t have to. (Note: I have no connection with them) http://cafe.bevocal.com/tools/vxmlchecker/vxmlchecker.jsp

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