Summary of the Voice Browser Working Group meeting in Redmond Washington

The Voice Browser Working Group met in Redmond, Washing June 4-6.  This 
note summarizes the actions taken at this meeting. 

The implementation report for VoiceXML 2.0 is nearly complete; we plan 
to advance VoiceXML 2.0 from Candidate Recommendation to Proposed 
Recommendation in Q3.  Work resolving some technical issues with SRGS is 
proceeding, and we hope to proceed from Proposed Recommendation to Full 
Recommendation in conjunction with VoiceXML 2.0.  Technical work 
continues on SSML and Semantic Interpretation.   We are putting a 
priority to complete work SSML and move it to Candidate Recommendation 
in Q3.   

Based upon a small set of widely implemented extensions to VoiceXML 2.0, 
we anticipate an interim version of the dialog markup language called 
VoiceXML 2.1. These features will help developers build even more 
powerful, maintainable and portable voice-activated services, with 
complete backwards compatibility with the VoiceXML 2.0 specification. We 
expect to publish VoiceXML 2.1 as a small specification that describes 
the extensions to 2.0. We plan to publish the first working draft in 
September 2003.

The purpose of the next major version of the dialog markup language 
(code named "V3") is to provide powerful dialog capabilities which can 
be used to build advanced speech applications, and to provide these 
dialog capabilities in a form which can be easily and cleanly integrated 
with other W3C languages. For example, the Multimodal Interaction 
Activity would be able to combine this dialog language with markup 
languages for other modalities to build multimodal applications. In 
comparison with VoiceXML 2.0, the language will provide improved dialog 
functionality, greater flexibility, and be modularized so as to allow 
embedding in languages such XHTML, SMIL and SVG.  Work started in early 
2003 on collecting detailed requirements for this dialog markup 
language. The requirements are being drawn from sources including 
deferred change requests on VoiceXML 2.0, other activities within the 
Voice Browser group (especially Call Control), external contributions 
such as SALT 1.0 and XHTML+Voice Profiles, and other interested working 
groups within W3C especially Multimodal, XHTML, and WAI. The 
requirements are expected to be published in the 3rd quarter of 2003.  
We intend to publish the first working draft of this dialog language 
will be published in the first quarter of 2004.


We approved the publication of a revised working draft of CCXML, which 
is now available at http://www.w3.org/TR/ccxml/.  We anticipate a last 
call working draft of CCXML in about three months.

Received on Thursday, 19 June 2003 12:22:04 UTC