report of Chicago F2F meeting of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group

The W3C Voice Browser Working Group met in Chicago on Monday and 
Tuesday, June 19-20 and then jointly with the W3C Multimodal Interaction 
Working Group on June 21.  

We agreed to update the original VoiceXML 2.0 requirements document to 
reflect the requirements for VoiceXML 3.0.  We reviewed and adopted an 
approach for describing the various modules of VoiceXML 3.0 at a 
semantic (rather an a syntactic) level in order to reach a common 
understanding of the purposes and functions of each module and how the 
modules fit together, before proceeding with designing the VoiceXML 3.0 
syntax for the functions supported by each module.  

VoiceXML 3.0 will have a more powerful prompt queue which will present 
prerecorded audio, synthesized speech, and video to the user.  Users may 
jump forwards and backwards within the queue to repeat or skip 
information. Users may also adjust the speed and volume of content 
presentation.

IBM presented a demo of applications constructed using their open source 
version of SCXML: http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/scxml.  We held 
initial discussions on the data model format for SCXML, outlining the 
pros and cons of various data model formats.  Discussions will continue 
in future teleconferences. 

Thanks to Oracle and Motorola for hosting the meeting and related 
activities. The next VBWG face-to-face meeting is scheduled for Oslo, 
Norway September 20-22, 2006.

Jim Larson
Co-chair, Voice Browser Working Group