RE: Requirement for UA / SS protocol

Hi Milan,

* App-to-server events:

Okay, consider my arm twisted :-)  Nice example.  

* Re-recognition:

If we make this a requirement of the protocol, we're going to have to be careful about the design.  If the UA doesn't buffer the audio for re-recognition, this means a server somewhere is holding state, which may create an opportunity for evil apps/UAs to do bad things to services.  I guess this supports your point about increased effort speccing the protocol.

-----Original Message-----
From: Young, Milan [mailto:Milan.Young@nuance.com] 
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2010 8:00 PM
To: Robert Brown; Bjorn Bringert
Cc: public-xg-htmlspeech@w3.org
Subject: RE: Requirement for UA / SS protocol

Hello Robert,


Let's say the user is booking a flight.  They are presented with a multi-modal UI in which they can type or speak any of the component facts (date, city, etc).

If the implementation had to start and stop the recognition every time a new piece of data was filled in on the visual side, you'd run the risk of clipping.  It would be better if the visual could feed into the recognition stream with events (e.g. City=Seattle) in just the same way the recognition engine could feed events back to the visual.

Keep in mind that although we haven't seen this class of advanced visual/speech integrations outside the lab, they are most certainly coming.  I believe this Speech HTML is going to unleash a flurry of innovation.



On the re-recognition front, I do not support the UI buffering and resending the data.  This is a needless use of UA memory, bandwidth, and entails inherent latencies.  The only significant downside I can think of is increased effort specing the protocol.  But we have to do something similar for text interpretation anyway, so I don't think it's such a big deal.



Thank you


-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Brown [mailto:Robert.Brown@microsoft.com]
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2010 4:25 PM
To: Young, Milan; Bjorn Bringert
Cc: public-xg-htmlspeech@w3.org
Subject: RE: Requirement for UA / SS protocol

* App-to-server events:

I think this example illustrates the concept, but I'm skeptical that that particular application would ever be built.  If I can scroll through the list, it's probably a short list, so I doubt the recognizer will need any hints.  And I may as well just touch the person's name, since I can see it right there on the screen.  It feels academic to me.

* Re-recognition:

Another re-recognition example is the user saying "Starbucks in Redmond Washington".  The initial grammar doesn't have all the business names for all the districts in the entire continent, but it is good at detecting which district the user is talking about.  The re-recognition is then done using a business listing grammar that's specific to that district.

But I think there may be an argument that re-recognition is not a hard requirement of the protocol.  The UA could just as easily buffer the audio, and re-send it for a second recognition if required by the app.  

Maybe there should just be a requirement: "The Web Application should be able to re-use the audio recording from one recognition to perform another recognition."

-----Original Message-----
From: Young, Milan [mailto:Milan.Young@nuance.com]
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2010 8:20 AM
To: Bjorn Bringert; Robert Brown
Cc: public-xg-htmlspeech@w3.org
Subject: RE: Requirement for UA / SS protocol

First the use cases:

Web-app to SS events - The user wants to place a call, but can't quite remember the name of the contact.  The visual UI scrolls through the list of contacts and sends an event each time a new contact is displayed.  The recognizer uses this information to weight the recognition result because it's likely the user will speak a name it has just seen.

Re-recognition using previous audio - The user has requested directory assistance to find a residential phone number.  They thought the contact lived in City-A, but no relevant results found.  They want to try again in City-B, and shouldn't have to be asked again for the utterance.

Interpretation over text - A common approach in speech processing is to use a large statistical or speaker-dependent model to identify the lexical nature of the tokens.  A second pass over the data extracts meaning from the tokens.  At present, this second pass seems to be a more difficult task, and sometimes several attempts need to be made each with a different base context.  For example the word "bill" might refer to a financial transaction, a duck, a hat, or a person.



Other responses:

FPR11 - I'd like to add a second sentence to this statement (either in summary or text).  "This includes both TBD standard and extension parameters."

FPR28 and 29 - Perhaps these statements could be slightly adjusted with "... fire implementation-specific events to the web app".

FPR4 - EMMA seems like a sufficiently flexible standard to handle all foreseeable needs.  Perhaps now is not the time, but I'd like to see if we can agree to make this a required part of the protocol.


Thanks



-----Original Message-----
From: Bjorn Bringert [mailto:bringert@google.com]
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2010 3:17 AM
To: Robert Brown
Cc: Young, Milan; public-xg-htmlspeech@w3.org
Subject: Re: Requirement for UA / SS protocol

We already had a requirement that there must be a standard protocol.
If I understand this list correctly, it adds a number of requirements on what features this standard protocol must support. I propose that we consider each of the bullet points a separate requirement, so that they can be discussed independently.

I think that most of them look fine. The only two that I'm not sure about are:

- web-app -> speech service events, with the same objection that Robert raised.

- Re-recognition using previous audio streams. What's the use case for this?


Also, I think that the following are already covered by existing requirements:

- "Both standard and extension parameters passed from the web app to the speech service at the start of the interaction.  List of standard parameters TBD."
  Covered by "FPR11. If the web apps specify speech services, it should be possible to specify parameters."

- The speech service -> web app part of the birirectional events requirement is covered by:

FPR21. The web app should be notified that capture starts.
FPR22. The web app should be notified that speech is considered to have started for the purposes of recognition.
FPR23. The web app should be notified that speech is considered to have ended for the purposes of recognition.
FPR24. The web app should be notified when recognition results are available.
FPR28. Speech recognition implementations should be allowed to fire implementation specific events.
FPR29. Speech synthesis implementations should be allowed to fire implementation specific events.

- "EMMA results passed from the SS to the web app.  The syntax of this result is TBD (e.g. XML and/or JSON)."
Covered by:
FPR4. It should be possible for the web application to get the recognition results in a standard format such as EMMA.

- "Interpretation over text."
Covered by (if I understand it correctly):
FPR2. Implementations must support the XML format of SRGS and must support SISR.


So, the remaining requirements from Milan's list that I support adding are:

* At least one standard audio codec.  UAs are permitted to advertise alternate codecs at the start of the interaction and SSs are allowed to select any such alternate (e.g. HTTP Accept).

* Transport layer security (e.g. HTTPS) if requested by the web app.

* Session identifier that could be used to form continuity across multiple interactions (e.g. HTTP cookies).

/Bjorn

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 1:49 AM, Robert Brown <Robert.Brown@microsoft.com> wrote:
> I mostly agree.  But do we need bidirectional events?  I suspect all 
> the interesting ones originate at the server: start-of-speech; 
> hypothesis; partial result; warnings of noise, crosstalk, etc.  I'm 
> trying to think why the server would care about events from the 
> client, other than when the client is done sending audio (which it 
> could do in response to a click or end-point detection).
>
>
>
> From: public-xg-htmlspeech-request@w3.org
> [mailto:public-xg-htmlspeech-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Young, Milan
> Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2010 5:34 PM
> To: public-xg-htmlspeech@w3.org
> Subject: Requirement for UA / SS protocol
>
>
>
> Hello,
>
>
>
> On the Nov 18th conference, I volunteer to send out proposed wording 
> for a new requirement:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Summary - User agents and speech services are required to support at 
> least one common protocol.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Description - A common protocol will be defined as part of the final 
> recommendation.  It will be built upon some TBD existing application 
> layer protocol and include support for the following:
>
>
>
>   * Streaming audio data (e.g. HTTP 1.1 chunking).  This include both 
> audio streamed from UA to SS during recognition and audio streamed 
> from SS to UA during synthesis.
>
>
>
>   * Bidirectional events which can occur anytime during the interaction.
> These events could originate either within the web app (e.g. click) or 
> the SS (e.g. start-of-speech or mark) and must be transmitted through 
> the UA in a timely fashion.  The set of events include both standard 
> events defined by the final recommendation and extension events.
>
>
>
>   * Both standard and extension parameters passed from the web app to 
> the speech service at the start of the interaction.  List of standard 
> parameters TBD.
>
>
>
>   * EMMA results passed from the SS to the web app.  The syntax of 
> this result is TBD (e.g. XML and/or JSON).
>
>
>
>   * At least one standard audio codec.  UAs are permitted to advertise 
> alternate codecs at the start of the interaction and SSs are allowed 
> to select any such alternate (e.g. HTTP Accept).
>
>
>
>   * Transport layer security (e.g. HTTPS) if requested by the web app.
>
>
>
>   * Session identifier that could be used to form continuity across 
> multiple interactions (e.g. HTTP cookies).
>
>
>
>   * Interpretation over text.
>
>
>
>   * Re-recognition using previous audio streams.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Thank you
>
>



--
Bjorn Bringert
Google UK Limited, Registered Office: Belgrave House, 76 Buckingham Palace Road, London, SW1W 9TQ Registered in England Number: 3977902

Received on Tuesday, 23 November 2010 00:00:01 UTC