RE: EMMA in Speech API (was RE: Speech API: first editor's draft posted)

Yes, the developer could certainly do that, but the NULL check and
subsequent hand-building of EMMA introduces a service dependency into the
developer's Javascript, which I think we want to minimize.  I think it would
be better if the speech recognizers that don't support EMMA natively just
put a minimal EMMA wrapper around the token result for EMMAXML and EMMAText.

 

From: Glen Shires [mailto:gshires@google.com] 
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2012 3:08 PM
To: Young, Milan
Cc: Deborah Dahl; Hans Wennborg; public-speech-api@w3.org; Satish S
Subject: Re: EMMA in Speech API (was RE: Speech API: first editor's draft
posted)

 

Deborah,

Since the JavaScript Speech API we're defining is new, I presume there must
be a new JavaScript "glue" layer between the Speech API and the existing
applications, dialog managers and log analysis tools that you mention. [1]
Since the minimal EMMA wrapper you've defined is so simple, it could easily
be generated in that JavaScript "glue" layer.

 

I propose that we define attributes for EMMAXML and EMMAText so that
recognizers that do support these do return them, and we make it acceptable
for user-agents to return NULL for these attributes for recognizers that
don't support EMMA.

 

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-speech-api/2012Apr/0014.html

 

Thanks,

Glen Shires

 

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 9:32 AM, Young, Milan <Milan.Young@nuance.com>
wrote:

Thanks for the example Deborah.

 

Being that it would be so simple for a recognition engine (or even a UA) to
add EMMA, are there any objections to exposing it?  We would of course also
provide plain text to support the simple use cases.

 

 

 

From: Deborah Dahl [mailto:dahl@conversational-technologies.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2012 8:52 AM
To: Young, Milan; 'Glen Shires'


Cc: 'Hans Wennborg'; public-speech-api@w3.org; 'Satish S'

Subject: EMMA in Speech API (was RE: Speech API: first editor's draft
posted)

 

Hi Milan,

Yes, I think that it wouldn't be too difficult to wrap a token result with a
minimal  EMMA wrapper.

 

I think the following would be the minimal EMMA required to represent just
the spoken tokens. 

Utterance: "flights from Boston to Denver"

 

<emma:emma version="1.0" xmlns:emma="http://www.w3.org/2003/04/emma">

    <emma:interpretation id="int1" 

      emma:medium="acoustic" 

      emma:mode="voice">

         <emma:literal>

              flights from boston to denver

         </emma:literal>

   </emma: interpretation>

</emma:emma>

 

If you wanted to add confidence and a semantic interpretation, the EMMA
would be like this:

<emma:emma version="1.0" xmlns:emma="http://www.w3.org/2003/04/emma">

    <emma:interpretation id="int1" 

      emma:confidence="0.75"

     emma:tokens="flights from boston to denver" 

     emma:medium="acoustic" 

     emma:mode="voice">

      <origin>Boston</origin>

      <destination>Denver</destination>

   </emma:interpretation>

</emma:emma>

 

Debbie

 

From: Young, Milan [mailto:Milan.Young@nuance.com] 
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2012 6:18 PM
To: Deborah Dahl; 'Glen Shires'
Cc: 'Hans Wennborg'; public-speech-api@w3.org; 'Satish S'
Subject: RE: Speech API: first editor's draft posted

 

Deborah, is there a form of an EMMA result that only encodes the spoken
phrase (omits interpretation etc)?  If so, perhaps vendors that do not
currently support EMMA could use this trivial wrapper to achieve compliance.

 

Either way I agree that EMMA must be a part of the spec.  I didn't notice
that this had been pulled in this most recent proposal or I would have
mentioned it myself.

 

Thanks

 

From: Deborah Dahl [mailto:dahl@conversational-technologies.com] 
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2012 1:21 PM
To: 'Glen Shires'
Cc: 'Hans Wennborg'; public-speech-api@w3.org; 'Satish S'
Subject: RE: Speech API: first editor's draft posted

 

I think standardization will actually be accelerated by making EMMA part of
the specification. EMMA (and its predecessor NLSML) were in fact originally
partly motivated by the non-interoperable and proprietary ways that
different speech recognizers represented semantic interpretations. This made
it very difficult for an application to be used with different speech
recognizers.

I don't know what proportion of existing speech services do or don't support
EMMA, but there are definitely speech services, as well multimodal
application platforms, that do. I know that there will be applications and
more generally, development platforms, that won't be able to use this spec
unless they can get EMMA results. 

From: Glen Shires [mailto:gshires@google.com] 
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2012 3:37 PM
To: Deborah Dahl
Cc: Hans Wennborg; public-speech-api@w3.org; Satish S
Subject: Re: Speech API: first editor's draft posted

 

For this initial specification, we believe that a simplified API will
accelerate implementation, interoperability testing, standardization and
ultimately developer adoption.  Getting rapid adoption amongst many user
agents and many speech recognition services is a primary goal. 

 

Many speech recognition services currently do not support EMMA, and EMMA is
not required for the majority of use cases, therefore I believe EMMA is
something we should consider adding in a future iteration of this
specification.

 

/Glen Shires

 

 

On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Deborah Dahl
<dahl@conversational-technologies.com> wrote:

Thanks for preparing this draft.
I'd like to advocate including the EMMAText and EMMAXML attributes in
SpeechRecognitionResult. One argument is that at least some existing
consumers of speech recognition results (for example, dialog managers and
log analysis tools) currently expect EMMA as input. It would be very
desirable not to have to modify them to process multiple different
recognizer result formats. A web developer who's new to speech recognition
can ignore the EMMA if they want, because if all they want is tokens,
confidence, or semantics, those are available from the
SpeechRecognitionAlternative objects.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hans Wennborg [mailto:hwennborg@google.com]

> Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2012 10:36 AM
> To: public-speech-api@w3.org
> Cc: Satish S; Glen Shires
> Subject: Speech API: first editor's draft posted
>

> In December, Google proposed [1] to public-webapps a Speech JavaScript
> API that subset supports the majority of the use-cases in the Speech
> Incubator Group's Final Report. This proposal provides a programmatic
> API that enables web-pages to synthesize speech output and to use
> speech recognition as an input for forms, continuous dictation and
> control.
>
> We have now posted in the Speech-API Community Group's repository, a
> slightly updated proposal [2], the differences include:
>
>  - Document is now self-contained, rather than having multiple
> references to the XG Final Report.
>  - Renamed SpeechReco interface to SpeechRecognition
>  - Renamed interfaces and attributes beginning SpeechInput* to
> SpeechRecognition*
>  - Moved EventTarget to constructor of SpeechRecognition
>  - Clarified that grammars and lang are attributes of SpeechRecognition
>  - Clarified that if index is greater than or equal to length, returns
null
>
> We welcome discussion and feedback on this editor's draft. Please send
> your comments to the public-speech-api@w3.org mailing list.
>
> Glen Shires
> Hans Wennborg
>
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-
> webapps/2011OctDec/1696.html
> [2] http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/speech-api/raw-file/tip/speechapi.html





 

-- 
Thanks!

Glen Shires