Articulatory Synthesis Markup Language

Synthetic Media Community Group,

I would like to welcome everyone to the Synthetic Media Community Group.

I would like to call your attention to the group’s wiki pages and to a particular page describing Articulatory Synthesis Markup Language (ASML): https://www.w3.org/community/synthetic-media/wiki/Articulatory_Synthesis_Markup_Language .

Articulatory synthesis refers to computational techniques for synthesizing speech based on models of the human vocal tract and the articulation processes occurring there.

I’m hoping that ASML can be one of a number of ice-breaker topics for the new group.

Firstly, ASML supports model-independent animation; in this case, animations and simulations of speech articulation. Secondly, it supports the blending in of audio samples, e.g. for difficult-to-simulate consonants. Thirdly, via XML custom elements, it supports the programming of reusable animation sequences, the parameterization of such sequences, the nesting of custom elements, and more. Fourthly, it supports audio post-processing effects and the creation of audio post-processing graphs.

Envisioned use-case scenarios for ASML include the cloud-based, server-side and client-side rendering of speech audio. An example cloud-based rendering scenario is that of multimodal dialogue systems with digital characters interacted with via WebRTC. In this scenario, ASML processors are envisioned as running on the cloud, supporting both stateless and stateful, session-based, services, processing ASML into audio streams. In addition to streaming audio and video to end-users from server-side rendering, computer animation and articulation tracks could be streamed, e.g. across WebRTC, for client-side rendering. Also, one day, Web developers might be able to make use of ASML as they can SSML, today, via the Web Speech API.

Please feel free to introduce yourselves, comment on or ask any questions about ASML, broach any other synthetic media topics of interest whatsoever, and make use of the group’s wiki.

Welcome to the new group!


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski