Figuring stuff out

A full opensource voicexml platform that does IVR/TTS/ASR etc is hard to find.. there have been some attempts such as PublicVoicexml (last activity was 2006 for v4.0)... Pretty much what you find is various components for interacting with voicexml - jvoicexml (java based vxml interpreter), OpenVXi [1][2](vxml interpreter spec v2.0),  SpeakRight (java framework for generating VXML), Oktopous PIK (BSD licensed CCXML toolkit in C++), VoiceXML::Client (Perl extension for VXML clients, including useragent, parser and interpreter), as well as BladeWareVXML [sf site] which is based on OpenVXi.

Also RocketSource has some opensource VoiceXML enabled solutions such as one for an autoattendent and another for voicemail.

 

Otherwise you need to build it yourself... Which I assume is the reason Nuance, Voxeo, Vocalocity, etc are making big money for complete solutions.

If you just need to interpret VXML from a 3rd party one solution could be to use something such as jvoicexml and asterisk along with one or more of the java libraries for interfacing asterisk including: asterisk-java which uses the manager API; JAsterisk which spawns a jvm in asterisk that has full access to its internals; JastAgi (or JAGIServer which is not active) for AGI interfacing; put it all together an build a "translator" from vxml to asterisk API calls.

What I want is a VoiceXML parsing library for Ruby so I can use it with Adhearsion.

For a free but non-opensource solution one option is Voxeo's Prophecy platform.  I6net has an asterisk product called VXI* VoiceXML browser which does both video and voice for IVR (or simply IVVR).  For development purposes you can use Voxeo's free development platform found on their community developer site.