Re: Intent to incubate Speech API

I support moving into the WICG, and even more so the steps that would
follow.

It would be *cool* if URLs don't need to change, but that's not a blocking
concern.

On Thu, Oct 3, 2019 at 12:40 PM Marcos Caceres <marcos@marcosc.com> wrote:

> Dear Speech CG members,
>
> When we first embarked on the standardization of the Speech API nearly a
> decade ago, this group foresaw the rise and relevance that speech
> recognition and synthesis would make in the lives of people: Siri, Alexa,
> Cortana, and Google's voice assistant became an indispensable part of the
> computing experience. However, due to lack of interoperability and
> implementer interest, we are still yearning for the Web to take full
> advantage of speech technology.
>
> In creating the Speech API, we made some assumptions about how the speech
> API would be used that did not fully come to fruition. As such, we've seen
> limited implementation of the API, which in turn led to limited usage on
> the Web. An internal survey of archive.org found that only around 4000
> sites were using the Speech API in 2019. Although some sites are prominent
> (e.g., the Google homepage!), uptake overall remains negligible.
>
> As speech recognition and synthesis technology increasingly becomes
> central to all computing, Mozilla believes now is the time to rekindle the
> effort to bring the Speech API to browsers. Much has changed for the web
> platform since this effort began: we now have an extensive range of new
> architectural primitives in the web platform, much improved speech
> recognition technology (including free and open speech recognition samples
> and models). And, more importantly, we also have a deeper understanding of
> the privacy and security implications, accessibility challenges, and
> internationalization concerns, of what we are trying to standardize.
>
> With the benefit of hindsight, Mozilla would like the opportunity to
> restart this effort under the W3C's Web Incubation Community Group (WICG) -
> as an incubation, with the ultimate aim of W3C standardization. WICG is an
> active venue for developers and implementers with an extensive track record
> of successful incubations, allowing us to involve experts from a range of
> communities.
>
> To move the specification forward, we'd like to work together with this
> and the wider web standards community to revise the existing specification.
> We'd like to review what worked (i.e., what got implemented), what didn't,
> and how we can make the API better to best serve users and the developer
> community.
>
> Concrete steps:
>
>         • Move spec to the WICG - (re)invite implementers and the
> community to participate: something we are already doing in the GitHub
> repository.
>         • Update/modify/remove parts of the spec that were not implemented
> or cannot be implemented in an interoperable manner (active work has been
> happening on this recently).
>         • Address long standing privacy and security issues.
>         • Evaluate where the API can be improved.
>         • Write out the algorithms that would afford us interoperability:
> right now, the spec lacks any algorithms, making it difficult to evaluate
> interoperable behavior.
>         • Create an extensive test suite, which would assure both the
> quality of the specification and the interoperability of implementations.
>
> Hope you will come join us on GitHub to make the Speech API a success!
> https://github.com/w3c/speech-api
>
> Kind regards,
> Marcos Caceres and Andre Natal, Mozilla