Overview paragraph

Group,
At the last meeting I volunteered to put together a few paragraphs that would set the context, the rationale and the goals for the HTML Speech incubation group.
Below is my first attempt at capturing those points to be included in the report introduction.

Thanks,
Dan


Context:

Speech technologies are available today from many software manufacturers on a variety of platforms with implementations allowing a wide selection of development tools and on multiple device types. These speech technologies cover aspects of the user interaction using spoken commands, dictation, text to speech and speech to text recognition. While there are endless possibilities and uses for speech technologies from accessibility to user convenience in many fields like medical, education and others, there is a great potential of adoption in the rapidly evolving realm of web applications.
HTML5 has brought the rich user experience to the web and developments in the field of voice recognition allow real time user to machine dialogue in the car, on the phone and at the desktop. With the web moving beyond the desktop and the browser, it is imperative necessary to find ways to streamline the process of developing web applications and create interoperable speech APIs that will work across multiple browsers and speech providers giving the developers choice and consistency in implementing rich speech enabled web applications.

Goals:

The goal for the HTML Speech incubator group is to identify and document common requirements and use cases necessary to support the standardization of  API(s) that will enable web developers to design and deploy speech enabled web applications and provide the user with a consistent experience across different platforms and devices irrespective of the speech engine used. The outcome of the group's findings should result in  design recommendation(s) that would foster innovation and promote consistency by leveraging and enhancing existing work in W3C as well as other standards bodies.
The driver for the standard design will be a common and agreed upon understanding of the elements and interactions necessary to create an end to end multi modal user experience  and to avoid development fragmentation in using HTML and JavaScript when developing interoperable speech enabled web applications.

Received on Tuesday, 19 April 2011 20:35:30 UTC