Re: phonetic markup

For those of you who weren't able to attend my talk on
speech synthesis at the WAI meeting in Austin last week
I have copied the slides to the server at:

   http://www.w3.org/WAI/Talks/9711-Speech/slide1.htm

Note that I believe W3C should be aiming for high quality
speech synthesis which is able to cope with things like:

 - in French you can change an assertion into a question
   by a raising emphasis at the end of the sentence.

 - speaking in a louder and quicker voice indicates
   increased excitement or even anger

Subtle control over emphasis is lacking in IPA. Furthermore
attempts to represent IPA in ASCII include characters such
as " and ' which can make it harder to express using HTML
or XML attributes.

I am interested in easier to write notations similar to those
commonly used in regular dictionaries. These are language specific,
but then so are the pronunciation dictionaries being extended.
Perhaps a language/culture independent represetation such as
being proposed for Java by Sun is also needed. This could be
harder to write -- Sun's uses XML.

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2984 (or 2521) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Wednesday, 19 November 1997 11:02:44 UTC