Acknowledgements

The process of writing this book has benefited from the contributions of many individuals and companies that helped in different capacities.

To start with, we would like to thank Charles Goldfarb for including our book in the Definitive XML Series, Mark Taub, the Editor-in-Chief at Prentice Hall, for making this all possible, and Alina Kirsanova and Dmitry Kirsanov for preparing this book for publication.

We are grateful to the following individuals that gave their insightful comments: Jeff Kusnitz at IBM, Rob Marchand at VoiceGenie, Kim Kiat Tan, and Michael Scordilis and his team at Miami University. Additionally, we'd like to thank James Hubbell at Design For Users and Jonathan Bloom at Speechworks for their input on human factors engineering.

There were several companies that provided us access to their voice products, documentation, and development tools, which allowed us to develop and test many of the code samples in this book. These companies include Nuance, IBM, SpeechWorks, Telera, Verascape and GetVocal.

Lastly, we'd like to thank Bill Dykas, VoiceXML Forum Chairman of the Board, for his guidance and the VoiceXML Forum for hosting code samples from the book and their efforts in making VoiceXML what it is today.

Adam Hocek and David Cuddihy
New York, NY
September 14, 2002