Natural language applications are developed using Voximizer, an integrated development environment that lets you easily create a speech interface to any application.
Voximizer promotes a rapid develop-and-test cycle with its approach to fast prototyping. Its wizard lets you enter example sentences and get them to work quickly. In the same process, a skeleton of the application's object model is built up. When the prototyping passes on to the fine-tuning of the application, Voximizer offers a number of editing possibilities.
The easy-to-use interface of Voximizer supports your needs to get quick results and focus on the application being developed instead of the underlying technology.
When creating an application, you begin by typing example sentences that the application is expected to handle. In a stereo application, for example, the sentences might be "Play a romantic song" or "Play some Swedish dance music".
The wizard guides you through different dialogs to set up the object model representing the sentences. This means that a skeleton of the object model is built up in the same time as the functionality for the example sentences is implemented.
When fine-tuning the object model, you can, for example, change the attributes of objects, insert new base classes in the object hierarchy, and add synonyms and pronunciations for the words used in the application.
Building applications
In the screenshot above of Voximizer, the two example sentences "Play a romantic song" and "Play some Danish music" were entered in the wizard. The sentences have been worked through to build the skeleton of the application. The stoplights beside each sentence are used to signal to the developer whether the sentence cannot be parsed, is parsable but not executable, or parsable and executable.
In the Class/Instance browser, the created objects can be found along with other objects. Also, a new class representing music genres has been defined under which the genre objects Romantic and Danish have been put.
The Object Editor can be used to manipulate the object's attributes and method implementations.
In the Dictionary browser the words of the application are presented in either dictionary view or thesaurus view.