SSML 1.1 July 2007 face-to-face meeting summary

The SSML subgroup of the Voice Browser Working Group held its sixth
meeting in Hangzhou, China, on July 4-6, 2007.  The meeting included
attendees by Toshiba, Panasonic, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, IBM,
iFLYTEK, and Nuance.  

 

The primary goals of this meeting were to review and address preliminary
comments from external reviewers and to begin writing assertions and
tests in preparation for producing an Implementation Report Plan early
next year.  From the external comments we realized that our
specification text explaining the new voice and xml:lang behavior was
insufficient. We will improve this text and simplify the <voice>
"required" attribute by introducing a new "ordering" attribute that
controls all voice selection feature priority ordering.  To better align
the functionality with what we believe authors will expect, changes in
voice are now scoped, whether they occur by author use of the <voice>
element or automatically by the processor upon language speaking
failure.  We will also make use of RFC4647 [1] to explain how language
tags are used in voice selection.  On a separate topic, we decided to
develop our own Pronunciation Alphabet Registry so one will exist by the
time we reach Candidate Recommendation; we hope to integrate this into
the work of the IETF Language Tags group at a future date.  We also
reviewed all outstanding change requests, reviewed other changes to the
specification introduced by the main Voice Browser Working Group,
reviewed the preliminary test assertions that had been written, and
wrote a few tests as a group.  To ensure continued progress on the
assertions and tests, we will be starting a biweekly teleconference for
review and discussion of Implementation Report-related issues.

 

We expect to publish an updated Working Draft of the specification
before our next meeting.

 

Our next meeting will be held via teleconference October 9-11, 2007.

 

Dan Burnett and Zhi Wei Shuang, Co-chairs, Speech Synthesis Subgroup,
VBWG

 

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4647.txt