SSML 1.1 October 2007 meeting summary

The SSML subgroup of the Voice Browser Working Group held its seventh
meeting by teleconference on October 9-11, 2007.  The meeting included
attendees by Toshiba, IBM, France Telecom, Loquendo, and Nuance.   

 

The primary goals of this meeting were to review and address any
outstanding change requests, review and address any comments from public
reviewers of the third Working Draft, to plan the remainder of our
Implementation Report Plan assertion and test writing, and to prepare
for the Last Call Working Draft.

The most substantive changes in the last Working Draft were those made
by the main Voice Browser Working Group with respect to new features for
the <audio> element.  The subgroup reviewed those changes and initiated
a conversation with the main Voice Browser Working Group about the
optionality and syntax of these new <audio> features.  We also revamped
the description of the voice selection algorithm for the <voice> element
to make it clearer how it works.  Additionally, we defined the default
gain and pitch of a document to be that of the unmodified
voice/waveform.

At this point the most significant issues to resolve are the details
around the new <audio> attributes, including the control authors should
have over separate or joint modification of audio speed and pitch.

We will have a monthly teleconference to track progress on the remaining
IR assertions and tests.

 

We expect to publish a Last Call Working Draft of the specification
before our next meeting. 

 

Our next meeting will be held in Beijing January 15-17, 2008.

 

 

Daniel C. Burnett and Zhi Wei Shuang, Co-chairs, Speech Synthesis
Subgroup, VBWG