Victor Manuel Alvarez Garcia (http://www.di.uniovi.es/~victoralvarez/) had his successful PhD defence for his thesis on “Voice Interactive Classroom, a service-oriented architecture to enable cross-platform multiple-channel access to Internet-based learning” and I am his co-supervisor so therefore I have been in Oviedo/Asturias.
Victor worked on audio and voice-enabled interfaces for learning management systems and web-services. In his thesis he combined his very interesting background from systems engineering, audio-based interaction, adaptive educational systems, service oriented architectures and other fields. In his thesis he gives an overview of the developments in Learning Management Systems towards Learning Service frameworks including such developments as IMS Abstract Framework, Open Knowledge Initiative, and the ELF or e-learning framework. he furthermore analyses and evaluates several technologies for voice-enabled applications as SALT and VoiceXML.
BTW did you know that the Russian Scientist Christian Kratzenstein succeeded in 1773 in producing vowel sounds using resonance tubes connected to organ pipes. 😉
In his case studies Victor has produced voice-enabled feed readers for personal learning or a phone-voice interface to Moodle for example being used to request your latest grades or feedback. He concludes his thesis with the introduction of the voice interactive classroom supporting a voice and visual interface to OKI enabled platforms as Moodle, Sakai, or Segue. Beside this the work holds a lots of practical experiences, tips, and insights about the usefulness, appropriateness, and pitfalls when using these technologies for building voice-enabled web-systems.
So congratulations Dr. Victor Manuel Alvarez Garcia !
Reference for downloading the thesis papers:
Source Code on Sourceforge: