RE: HTML and Multimedia Synchronization

Silvia,
 
I'll collect together the observations of digital book and textbook authors and authoring teams and invite them as well as scientists and technologists here to provide feedback upcoming.

I participated in that Speech API Community Group.  My recommendation is that the proposed specification could be an HTML 5.1 component.  There is also a proposed Working Group, the Web Speech Working Group (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-speech-api/2012Nov/att-0007/RevisedCharter.htm), which intends on starting with that deliverable, as an initial version, and versioning it to a recommendation in Q3 2014.

Some topics which I broached during Speech API Community Group discussions include transitioning from text-to-speech to XML-to-speech and from speech-to-text to speech-to-XML.  The speech synthesis API includes synthesizing both text and SSML and could version to include the synthesis of XML DOM elements, for example XHTML + MathML + SSML + SMIL, interoperably with the CSS speech module, interoperably with DOM events, interoperably with multimedia synchronization; that is, from "speechSynthesizer.speak(textOrSSML);" to an API also including "speechSynthesizer.speak(document.getElementById('paragraph123'));".  Other participants may have other ideas for versioning the speech API.
 
Other speech technology topics include versioning SSML for the enhanced prosodic synthesis of language including with mathematical and scientific notations, versioning SSML for NLG of SSML scenarios including pragmatics and semantics as pertinent to prosody and intonation, versioning the CSS speech module, SRGS topics such as prosody, intonation and grammar, speech-to-SSML, speech recognition grammars and XML DOM, and SISR JavaScript topics in web browsers.



Kind regards,

Adam