Michael Henretty

Mozilla
Michael Henretty

VoiceHTML - Speech Recognition as a Progressive Enhancement

Around 10 years ago, we had to reinvent the web to cope with tiny, touchable screens. In many ways we had to rethink the definition of a web application. These revisions yielded powerful new features like push notifications, and (usable) offline support.

With the rise of Voice Assistants [1], it's time to rethink the web once again. I would like to propose a new protocol for how voice assistants can interact with websites. The hope is to provide a viable alternative to the current "app store" model of the leading voice ecosystems. Instead, what if websites could advertise services that are voice enhanced, allowing voice assistance to find and interact more naturally with web content? To illustrate the idea, I will compare the use case of booking an airline ticket using a screen reader vs. a website enhanced with VoiceHTML.

1.) https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/intelligent-virtual-assistant-iva-market