The Site With the Lamp

May 26, 2004

What has VoiceXML got to do with SSL? not much. So why am I writing about it? Well today I purchased an SSL certificate. When a certificate authority issues you with a SSL or developer certificate they may verify the details that you provided with a phone call. In some cases a phone call is all the verification that they do.

In other words the only difference between a self signed certificate and one issued by most certificate authorities is that with a CA, you can be sure that someone answers the phone.

Anyway to get back to the topic, this particular vendor (whom I feel is very good), asks for your phone number then they place a call to that number and ask you to key in a verification code. Then you are prompted to speak your name.

Well so what's my point? the point is that there is an VoiceXML example in the IBM voice server SDK that does exactly the same thing. So what's the big deal? voice applications are in wide use, it's more widespread than people think - we just don't notice , that's all.