Speech technology provider Loquendo has announced that Speech Synthesis Markup Language version 1.1 is now a W3C Recommendation.

W3C (News - Alert) is an international community where member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards and guidelines designed to ensure long-term growth for the Web.

Speech Synthesis Markup Language “SSML” 1.1 has been designed to provide a rich, XML-based mark-up language to facilitate the generation of multilingual synthetic speech in Web and other applications.

Thanks to SSML, speech application developers and speech technology integrators have a standardized way of controlling synthetic speech -- on different synthesis-capable platforms and in many languages. Company officials said that they can do so by defining standard elements and attributes, enabling fine-grained control of speech output by modifying pronunciation, volume, pitch, rate, and more.

“The SSML specification is a significant development for application developers and technology integrators working around speech as it simplifies the creation of speech-based applications on the Web and elsewhere." said Paolo Baggia, director of International Standards at Loquendo (News - Alert).

“Loquendo TTS already offers many of the advanced features that have now become part of this open standard,” Baggia said.

SSML 1.1 extends TTS control to more parameters. Company officials said that for example trimming attribute enables different extracts of prompts or audio files to be rendered, according to context; the language attribute allows any voice to speak any language, so enabling the use of Loquendo’s Mixed Language Capability via SSML; and more.

Company officials said that a key motive for the creation of SSML 1.1 was also to address language-specific characteristics, adding features that support the creation of applications in ideogram-based languages such as Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, facilitating internationalization and multilingualism.

SSML 1.1 is also expected to be supported by the upcoming Loquendo TTS release in October 2010, company officials said.