speaking at the Voice Summit in Newark on Voice Interaction CG activities

Fyi, I'll be speaking at the Voice Summit conference
(https://www.voicesummit.ai/) on the "JSON Representation of Semantic
Information" draft
(https://w3c.github.io/voiceinteraction/voice%20interaction%20drafts/emmaJSO
N.htm). 

My talk is "Slots? Entities? Concepts: Agreeing on Formats for Voice
Application Tools" (Tuesday, July 23).

I'd welcome any thoughts or suggestions from the group about points that you
think I should include or emphasize.

 

Debbie

 

This is the abstract:

Thousands of developers have developed applications with popular voice
application tools like the Alexa Skills Kit, Microsoft LUIS and Google
DialogFlow. Anyone who has developed applications with more than one
platform will notice that a lot of the same concepts are used in the
different tools, but with different names. Some tools may talk about
"slots," while other tolls have "concepts" or "entities," even though these
are all basically the same idea. As another example, the system's level of
certainty about the accuracy of the results could be called the
"confidence," or the "score." Not only is the vocabulary different in
different toolkits, the overall representation of the results is structured
differently. Because of these differences between formats, if it turns out
to be necessary to change the platform for whatever reason (cost, missing
functionality, compatibility with other systems, or lack of vendor support)
converting the old application to a new format can be a time-consuming
process that wouldn't be necessary if there were a common, cross-platform
format. This talk will go over a recent draft proposal for a common natural
language result format, called "JSON Representation of Semantic
Information," published by the Voice Interaction Community Group of the
World Wide Web Consortium. The format is intended to be able to represent
the information contained in any of the popular toolkits. In addition, it
provides a common way to include more advanced information, such as inputs
that include graphical user actions (multimodal inputs). The goal of this
talk is to review the proposal with an audience of experienced application
developers, and get their feedback on the specific features of the draft,
possible new features, and the general value of a common format. We will
also discuss obstacles to the adoption of a common format and how they might
be addressed. I have many years of experience developing voice applications
with a variety of platforms and I am one of the chairs of the Voice
Interaction Community Group. I have worked on speech, natural language, and
multimodal standards since 1999.