Q3. Visit the W3C website...

Q3. Visit the W3C website and find the status of the VoiceXML project. When do you think it will affect business on the Web and what will its impact be?

Answer:

The status of the VoiceXML is that ...
The origins of VoiceXML began in 1995 as an XML-based dialog design language intended to simplify the speech recognition application development process within an AT&T project called Phone Markup Language (PML). As AT&T reorganized, teams at AT&T, Lucent and Motorola continued working on their own PML-like languages.
In 1998, W3C hosted a conference on voice browsers. By this time, AT&T and Lucent had different variants of their original PML, while Motorola had developed VoxML, and IBM was developing its own SpeechML. Many other attendees at the conference were also developing similar languages for dialog design; for example, such as HP's TalkML and PipeBeach's VoiceHTML.
The VoiceXML Forum was then formed by AT&T, IBM, Lucent, and Motorola to pool their efforts. The mission of the VoiceXML Forum was to define a standard dialog design language that developers could use to build conversational applications. They chose XML as the basis for this effort because it was clear to them that this was the direction technology was going.
In 2000, the VoiceXML Forum released VoiceXML 1.0 to the public. Shortly thereafter, VoiceXML 1.0 was submitted to the W3C as the basis for the creation of a new international standard. VoiceXML 2.0 is the result of this work based on input from W3C Member companies, other W3C Working Groups, and the public.
(W3C Recommendation, 2004)

When do I think VoiceXML will affect business on the web?
I think that VoiceXML will become more popular & common and will be used in ecommerce application more frequently from now on. VoiceXML makes people more convenient, for example, text-to-speech... etc. However, the drawback of VoiceXML is that larger bandwidth is required. Nowadays, the broadband network is offered by ISP to access Internet so large files such as Voice can be transmitted more easily. As a result, VoiceXML can be developed and used frequently and easily regardless of the bandwidth issue.
On the other hand, VoiceXML will also be used in mobile phone network. Similarly, 3G mobile phone network makes more bandwidth so that VoiceXML can be developed and used.

What will its impact be?
As mentioned above, VoiceXML will become more popular. The companies of ecommerce need to spend more cost to development VoiceXML application. The endusers also have to use broadband Internet or 3G phone.

Reference:

1. W3C Recommendation (2004). "Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) Version 2.0". W3C Recommendation, Retrieved from URL - http://www.w3.org/TR/voicexml20/