W3C gives browsing a voice

 

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 2 Apr 2007 at 07:49

The organisation that determines Web standards is turning its attention, once again, towards vocal interaction with websites. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has announced it is relaunching its Voice Browser Working Group, to better enable users to speak and listen to Web-based apps.

The group, says the W3C, will concentrate on 'standardising languages for capturing and producing speech, and for managing the dialog between users and computers'.

'The telephone was invented more than 150 years ago, and continues to be a very important means for us to communicate with each other,' says the W3C in its introduction to the group's work. 'The Web by comparison is very recent, but has rapidly become 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.'

Areas for standardisation include voice dialogs, speech synthesis, speech recognition, telephony call control for voice browsers and voice response sytems generally. This includes help for people with hearing or speaking impairments.

Possible applications identified by the W3C include accessing personal information (such as calendars, address and telephone lists and to-do lists), public information (weather, traffic conditions, school closures and local and national news) and business information (such as 'front desks' asking callers who or what they want and automated telephone ordering services or event booking services).

Specifically, the focus of the group, as before, will be on the W3C Speech Interface Framework suite of specifications, which includes the likes of VoiceXML, a Speech Recognition Grammar Specification, a Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) and Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition (SISR).

More details about the Voice Browser Working Group, including how to join, can be found here. Scott McGlashan, of HP, and Jim Larson, described as an 'invited expert' will chair the group.