Loquendo Discusses W3C Consortium and New Standards

Speech technologies provider Loquendo, makes it possible to easily create the ultimate speech-enabled applications in many widely spoken languages, thanks to their complete product line for navigation and handheld devices, desktop PCs and telephony servers.

 

The company has over 30 years of R&D experience and guarantees the same wide range of languages and the same core engine in all environments. Their technology offerings include: Loquendo TTS, Loquendo ASR, Loquendo Speaker Verification and the VoxNauta VoiceXML (News - Alert) Platform.

 

I took some time recently to chat with Paolo Baggia, Director of International Standards at Loquendo to find out more about the company and the speech technologies market. That interview can be found HERE.

 

Also during our conversation, Biaggia highlighted the importance of the W3C (News - Alert) Consortium for speech technologies and discussed with TMCnet the new standards they have introduced.

 

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) includes Member organizations from across the world who work together with the public and a full-time staff, to develop new Web standards and guidelines to help the Web to reach its full potential. The consortium believes that all Web technologies, hardware and software, that are used to access the Web should be able to be used together. Since 1994, they have published over 110 W3C Recommendation standards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

W3C is a standardization consortium that is creating a set of interoperable standards. In the W3C, two groups work actively on speech frameworks and standards:

 

The first, Voice Browsing working groups, completed the VoiceXML 2.0 and 2.1 standards in recent years along with many other standards that allow for easy,  interoperable access to speech technologies such as, SRGS and SISR for speech grammar; SSML for speech synthesis; PLS for both recognition and synthesis, and CCXML for call control. This was called Speech Interface Framework in 2000 by James A. Larson, co-chair of the VBWG and is today, not only almost complete, but also widely accessible in the market of voice platforms, IVRs and speech engines.

 

Another active area is the Multimodal Interaction working group, whose goal is to define standards for the creation of multimodal interfaces. This group is lead by Deborah Dahl and is currently working on producing new standards.

 

 

The most recent W3C Recommendations and, the final stage of a W3C specification, are:

 

- PLS 1.0, Pronunciation Lexicon Specification, which makes it possible to improve the pronunciation of words through phonetic languages or by transliteration. This can be a very useful tool for improving a standard and compliments and completes the Speech Interface Framework mentioned earlier.

- EMMA 1.0, Extensible MultiModal Annotation, is a rich language that represents the results of a speech recognizer for voice modality and of gesture or pen/stylus input. It can be used to convey complex results including N-best alternative results for speech recognition and a graph of word hypothesis, called a word lattice. Also, EMMA can be used to integrate different modalities following different criteria.

 

 

There are similarities because like with a Web browser - and there are many from proprietary to open source - you can browse the entire Web using http protocol. In a voice platform, there is a VoiceXML interpreter which can be accessed by http and a Web application which generates VoiceXML instead of HTML so the basis for building speech applications is the same.

 

 

 

The role of VoiceXML has been of paramount importance because it proposed a Web-based model to describe voice and DTMF applications. This idea immediately provoked a giant transformation in voice platforms to accept these languages as primary. This helped to transition from a legacy world of platforms with proprietary application development and proprietary use of speech technologies, to standard VoiceXML platforms and a standardized way to develop voice applications.

 

I also believe that the standards proposed by Voice Browsing working group, has helped to increase adoption in the speech applications industry.