The telephone was invented in the 1870s and continues to be a very important means for people to communicate with each other. The Web by comparison is very recent, but is rapidly becoming a competing communications channel. The convergence of telecommunications and the Web is now bringing the benefits of Web technology to the telephone, enabling Web developers to create applications that can be accessed via any telephone, and allowing people to interact with these applications via speech and telephone keypads. Historically W3C's standardization work on Voice technology of the Voice Browser Working Group was driven by the needs of call center telephony. However, today's mobile devices use not only the visual user interface but also the speech interface for accessing the Web, so the work is now driven by mobile device needs as well. Visual interfaces are very useful for accessing the Web but there are several possible barriers of communication only with the visual interface on small devices, and Voice technology could be a promising solution to the barriers. For example, Voice is available on any kind of phones and in all kinds of languages. Also it requires much less training to use since it is more natural than usual visual user interfaces.
The Voice Browser Working Group published the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.1 Recommendation on 7 September 2010. SSML 1.1 provides control over voice selection as well as speech characteristics such as pronunciation, volume, and pitch, and extends speech on the Web to an enormous new market by improving support for Asian languages and multi-lingual voice applications (press release, W3C Member Testimonials). The group also published Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0, the next generation dialog framework, as the sixth Working Draft on 31 August 2010 and as the seventh Working Draft on 17 June 2010 respectively. Voice Browser Call Control (CCXML) 1.0 was published as a Candidate Recommendation on 1 April 2010. The group is now wrapping up the Implementation Report and comments gathered during the Candidate Recommendation period in order to move forward to the Proposed Recommendation stage. On the other hand, the seventh Working Draft of State Chart XML (SCXML) was published on 13 May 2010.
The group held the Workshop on Conversational Applications in Somerset, New Jersey, US on 18-19 June 2010, and had discussion on possible use cases and prioritized requirements that ultimately would be used to identify improvements to the model of human language currently supported by W3C standards. The summary of the workshop is available online. The group held a face to face meeting on June 16-17 collocated with the above workshop and the Multimodal Interaction Working Group's meeting on June 14-15.
The Proposed Recommendation of CCXML is planned to be published shortly. The next draft of VoiceXML 3.0 is planned to be published early December. The Last Call Working Draft of SCXML is expected in the fourth quarter of 2010.
The group will hold the next face-to-face meeting on November 1-2 collocated with the Multimodal Interaction Working Group face-to-face meeting on November 4-5 during TPAC 2010 in Lyon.
| Group | Chair | Team Contact | Charter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Voice Browser Working Group (participants) | Jim Larson, Daniel Burnett | Kazuyuki Ashimura, Matt Womer | Chartered until 31 January 2012 |
This Activity Statement was prepared for TPAC 2010 (Members only) per section 5 of the W3C Process Document. Generated from group data.
Kazuyuki Ashimura, Voice Browser Activity Lead
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