chair's report from Orlando F2F meeting of VBWG, March 5-7, 2008

The W3C Voice Browser Working Group held its quarterly face-to-face
meeting March 5-7 in Orlando. We thank Voxeo for hosting our meeting,
giving us a tour of their data facility, providing us a nice working
environment, and hosting activities outside of the meeting including a
tour of the Kennedy Space Center.

During much of the face-to-face meeting, we reviewed preliminary draft
sections of VoiceXML 3.0. VoiceXML 3.0 will have at least two profiles:
Media Server Profile and VoiceXML 2.1 Profile.

Applications written as 2.1 documents can be executed under VoiceXML 3.0
processor using the 2.1 profile. As an example, the Implementation
Report tests for VoiceXML 2.1 (which include the Implementation Report
tests for VoiceXML 2.0) will be supported on VoiceXML 3.0 platform.
There are some exceptions: the VoiceXML 2.1 specifications will be
tightened to clarify ambiguities and improve interoperability.
Specifically, the built-in grammars will no longer be supported, and
several parameters with “platform dependent” default values will be
assigned specific default values.

We discussed the new <media> element, which is an enhanced and
generalized version of the VoiceXML <audio> element. It will permit
media formats which contain audio and video tracks. The <par> element
will specify playback of media in parallel, while <seq> will specify
playback in sequence.

We discussed the three new VoiceXML 3.0 functions:
We discussed following three new VoiceXML 3.0 functions, and also
discussed how they relate to speech recognition and speech prompting:
* speaker enrollment
* speaker identification
* speaker verification
and how they relate to speech recognition and speech prompting.

We also reviewed and clarified our requirements for recording speech.

In non-VoiceXML 3.0 activities, we reviewed and discussed some errata
for VoiceXML 2.0/2.1 and voted to publish another working draft of SSML
1.1.

Our next face-to-face meeting is scheduled for June 9-11, 2008 in
Saarbrueken, Germany.

Jim Larson

Voice Browser Working Group Co-chair

Received on Wednesday, 16 April 2008 05:11:00 UTC