VoiceXML 2.0 still useless for educational applications

Someone asked if it was practical to expect educational speech 
recognition applications to be delivered over the telephone.  
They are already; please see:

  http://www.ordinate.com/demos.jsp?sampletest

It is hard to tell from the draft whether anyone ever intends to 
address recognition results directly in VoiceXML.  Well?

Imagine if the HTML Forms standard left it up to the browser 
vendor to decide what gets sent when the operator presses "Submit"
-- is that the kind of standard you want to rely on?

Cheers,
James

> Why does VoiceXML still not have speech recognition results including:
> 
>   1.  access to the recorded audio speech recognized;
> 
>   2.  segmentation of the endpoints of words and phones;
> 
>   3.  confidence scores for words and phones;
> 
>   4.  N-best ordering of alternatives in the grammar,
> 
> even though these issues have been brought up long ago? 
> 
> Does anyone dispute that these functions are essential for educational 
> applications, such as pronunciation assessment and reading skill 
> evaluation?  Not to my knowledge; nobody has suggested that the research 
> cited on this list in support of those features was not the very best of 
> its kind, which I believe it still is.
> 
> Doesn't the W3C and the member companies want to be seen as supporting 
> educational applications of speech technology?
> 
> On the other hand, I STRONGLY APPLAUD Dave Raggett and the W3C members 
> who have been working on N-Gram language representations.  For concrete 
> examples of the reasons why non-BNF grammars are essential for 
> educational applications, please see this ongoing analysis of children's
> repetitions during oral reading:
> 
>   http://www.bovik.org/reps-char.cgi

Received on Wednesday, 17 January 2001 22:44:03 UTC