The Significance of JSAPI2

Conversay is concluding a six-year-plus global leadership effort to set the Java speech application development standard for mobile handsets – an initiative that opens up the promise of Conversational Computing™ to consumer markets worldwide.

Conversay began in 2001 to promote development of a world standard for integrating speech software into Java – Sun Microsystems’ world-leading programming language for embedded systems from cellular phones to music players, navigation devices, and cameras. Conversay recruited the world’s foremost Java users – IBM, Intel, Texas Instruments, Nokia and Motorola – and led this assembly as an expert group in designing the standard for global adoption.

After five years’ effort, Nokia gave final approval for the new standard in the summer of 2006. The result, announced in May 2007 with a pre-release version for developers, is JSAPI2: Java Speech Application Programming Interface Version 2.

The emergence of JSAPI2 as a speech application development standard is analogous to the emergence of standard browsers for accessing the Internet. Now speech application developers have a level playing field and a potentially limitless audience. The JSAPI2 standard is expected to apply to one and a half billion wireless phones by 2011 and could affect other handheld devices such as music players, navigation aids and cameras – a total population of more than three billion Java devices.

Conversay maintains ownership of the JSAPI2 specification, which is part of the Java Community Process (JCP) and listed as JSR 113. Conversay is creating the Reference Implementation (“RI”) and the Technology Compatibility Kit (“TCK”) to aid compliance. And Conversay is establishing a community of speech application developers to assist with standards familiarization and adoption; see Developers for details.

Some statistics illustrating the global reach of Java:

  • 8 of 10 new phones that shipped in 2005 were Java technology-enabled phones (Ovum).
  • Java is a leading platform for mobile applications and services with 180 carrier deployments worldwide (Sun, 06/06).
  • Downloads of the Java Runtime Environment from java.com have reached over 344 million (Sun, 09/06).
  • Over 800 million desktops have Java software.
  • Over 5 million downloads of Java technology went to enterprise applications (Sun, 05/06).
  • Over 1.2 billion handsets were Java-enabled by June 2006 (Ovum).
  • Over 3.8 billion Java technology enabled devices (Sun, 11/2006)