Comments on the Last Call Working Draft of the PLS specification

The W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group has reviewed the 
Pronunciation Lexicon Specification [1] and has prepared the
following comments. These are not specific requests for changes,
but comments on how the PLS might fit into multimodal 
applications.

Usually PLS is used within a voice modality component and is
not exposed as its own modality component. However, a TTS
component (e.g. a prompt) might want to  expose PLS events.
For example, loading a lexicon module, or when a specific
pronunciation is unavailable. These events would be generated
by the modality component that interprets and applies the PLS.

PLS might be useful for spelling correction as part of a
multimodal application, but this isn't seen as an important
use case. So for most purposes, PLS is transparent to MMI.

Current synthesizers are weak with respect to contextualized 
pronunciations and it is desirable that PLS provide a convenient 
means for application developers to work around that, i.e. more 
convenient than providing explicit pronunciations in SSML for each 
occurrence of a word that would otherwise be mispronounced.

Pronunciation lexicons might be exposed through the Delivery
Context Interfaces (DCI)[2]. In principle, you could use this to
set the default lexicon and other configuration properties.
The DCI models properties as a hierarchy of DOM nodes and could
be used to expose capabilities and the means to adjust the
corresponding properties, e.g. which languages are supported
by the speech synthesiser, the default pitch, rate and many
other properties.

Otherwise, no specific comments.

best regards,

Debbie Dahl
MMI Working Group Chair

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/pronunciation-lexicon/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-DPF-20051111/

Received on Monday, 15 May 2006 17:18:13 UTC