Is the web ready for voice user interfaces?

The dream of communicating with computers using natural language has been around for almost half a century. Voice user interfaces (VUIs) are already available in the consumer sector through Alexa or Siri. This talk will examine how web applications can be expanded to include a voice interface consisting of speech synthesis and recognition based on current best practices from science for VUI. An example application will be used to demonstrate the existing possibilities. A particular concern of this talk is to address the limitations of the current W3C standard WebSpeech API. The non-functional requirements of availability on different system environments, data security and offline capability will be analysed in more detail. The source code and documentation of Webkit, Chromium and the Gecko engine are included in this analysis. Finally, an outlook is given on the challenges for VUIs on the web for the next decade.