Voice Project

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Mentor: David Horat

Objective

Adapt Moodle interface to output the needed VoiceXML so you can navigate with your voice with a VoiceXML enabled browser, such as Opera.

Benefits

Moodle is a free software e-learning platform which is designed to help educators create online courses with rich multimedia content. Making Moodle voice enabled will help disabled people, specially blind and motor disabled, to interact with this great e-Learning tool. Not only that, but also this gives another input interface which can be used to interact faster with the application.

Timeplan

• Analysis (2 weeks : May 28th - June 10th)
  • Study W3C VoiceXML 2.0
  • Extract requirements: study Moodle output and code to choose what to make voice enabled
  • Begin project webpage, documentation and logs
• Design (1 weeks : June 11 th - June 17th)
  • Make an Architectural Design
  • Make an Implementation Proposal
• Implementation (8 weeks : June 18th - August 5th)
  • Milestone X (each 2 weeks)
• Documentation (2 weeks : August 20th - August 31th)
  • Developer documentation
  • Moodle administrator documentation
  • Future roadmap and design plans

Scope

Due to the large Moodle code, the scope of what to make voice enabled will be decided in the Analysis phase, although it will be at least all navigational stuff, such as course selection, profile configuration and resource selection.

State of the Art of VoiceXML

VoiceXML is a well known technology that has been used and supported by IVR several years. Now it has finally come to our desktop. Currently, this technology is only supported by Opera in the standard browsers field, but since it is a W3C Standard, I hope it will become the defacto technology for this kind of service in all browsers. There are already plans to implement it in Firefox and Konqueror. Some examples of this technology can be found at:

• http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/add-voice-interactivity-to-your-site/
• http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/temporary-x-v-by-example/
• http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/xhtml-voice-in-action/

Architecture Description

1. We have the option of using Customized Scripts so we will not interfere with normal Moodle development. On the other hand, we can directly merge it in the current CVS.
2. Our code will detect whether the user browser is VoiceXML enabled or not and send the corresponding code
3. In the "future roadmap" it will be included how to embed the code in Moodle core (in case it isnt) and make a Moodle configuration option to activate voice features. (It can be done in the project if we have enough time)

Related Work

• Moodle for Mobiles CVS
  • Outputs Compact HTML, uses Customized Scripts
• Interesting alternative from talklets.com