**Abstract**

During the past decades, the landscape of speech and DTMF applications has changed from being based on proprietary platforms to being completely based on speech standards. The W3C Voice Browser Working Group played a primary goal in this change. This chapter describes that change, highlights the standards created by the W3C VBWG, and discusses the benefits that these standards have provided in many other application fields, including multi-modal interfaces.

**Keywords:** human-computer interaction, speech recognition, speech synthesis, pronunciation lexicons, natural language, spoken dialog, speech grammars, multi-modal interaction
