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New Standards Confirmed for Voice-driven Web Applicationshttp://www.w3.org/ --(Business Wire)-- W3C published standards today that enhance the capabilities and interoperability of voice browsers and speech recognition systems. The W3C Voice Browser Working Group has completed work on both VoiceXML 2.1 and Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition (SISR) 1.0, two critical pieces of W3C's Speech Interface Framework. Testimonials from companies and organizations demonstrate strong support for the new standards. Voice XML 2.1 Standarizes Industry Interoperability Practices VoiceXML 2.1 extends the widely used VoiceXML 2.0 dialog language to include commonly implemented features. These features include dynamic references to grammars and scripts, detecting when during a prompt the user barges-in, and processing multiple sets of data from the server in a single access. All VoiceXML 2.0 applications will work under VoiceXML 2.1 without modification, allowing for significant interoperability. SISR Improves Voice to Mark-up Conversion Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition (SISR 1.0) enables developers to extract and translate textual representations of words recognized by a speech recognition system and structure the results into a format convenient for processing by the speech application. For example, with SISR, one could specify the instructions for converting the spoken sentence "I want to fly from Los Angeles to Seattle." to a data structure containing "departure: LAX" and "destination: SEA". Speech Interface Framework Built by International Leaders in Research and Industry W3C's Voice Browser Working Group includes leaders in telephony and Web applications development, including Aspect Communications; Chinese Academy of Sciences; Comverse Technology; Deutsche Telecom AG; France Telecom; Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories; HP; IBM; iFLYTEK; IWA-HWG; Intervoice; Korea Association of Information and Telecommunication; Loquendo S.p.A.; Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.; MITRE Corporation; Nuance Communications; Openwave Systems Inc.; SandCherry, Inc.; Toshiba Corporation; Voxeo Corporation; and Voxpilot Ltd. The W3C Speech Interface Framework includes the completed standards VoiceXML 2.1, SISR 1.0, Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS 1.0), and Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML 1.0). W3C anticipates that the next pieces of the Speech Interface Framework to become W3C Recommendations are CCXML, Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS 1.0) and SSML 1.1. The Voice Browser Working Group is also developing State Chart XML (SCXML) and VoiceXML 3.0. About the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C primarily pursues its mission through the creation of Web standards and guidelines designed to ensure long-term growth for the Web. Over 400 organizations are Members of the Consortium. W3C is jointly run by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University in Japan,and has additional Offices worldwide. For more information see http://www.w3.org/ |
