SSML 1.1 July face-to-face meeting summary

The SSML subgroup of the Voice Browser Working Group held its tenth  
meeting in Lanzhou, China on July 22-24, 2008.  The meeting included  
attendees by IBM, iFlyTek, France Telecom, Toshiba, and Voxeo.   
Northwest Normal University graciously hosted this meeting, providing  
wonderful facilities, meals, and an optional trip to Dunhuang to  
visit the Mogao caves.


The primary goals of this meeting were to review and address any  
outstanding change requests, review and address any comments from  
public reviewers of the Last Call Working Draft, to make progress on  
the Pronunciation Alphabet Registry, and to prepare for the Candidate  
Recommendation.

We received a small number of comments, mostly related to  
internationalization and accessibility.  Although most comments were  
either minor suggestions or compliments, a request to modify the  
<sub> element required substantial discussion before we concluded  
that the change was out of scope for this version.  We also carefully  
considered a question about how the Pronunciation Alphabet mechanism  
could be used, culminating in a decision that we think will satisfy  
JEITA's long-standing Ruby support requests.

We completed an extensive review of the Implementation Report Plan.   
It should be ready to publish some time in September.

As a group we reviewed all unreviewed Implementation Report tests,  
fixing a number of bugs and simplifying many of the tests.

We carefully reviewed, and largely rewrote, the current draft of the  
Pronunciation Registry Policy document.  It now more closely matches  
the structure and process described in BCP47 for Language Tags,  
including a title change to "Tags for the Identification of  
Pronunciation Alphabets".
We have a few items to discuss with the IETF languages people, but we  
think the document will be ready sometime in October for publication  
as an Internet Draft.


We continue to have weekly teleconferences to work on issues that  
arise and to track progress on the remaining IR assertions and tests.

We expect to publish a Candidate Recommendation of the specification  
before our next meeting.

Our next meeting will be held by teleconference in October or November.


Daniel C. Burnett and 双志伟 (Zhi Wei Shuang)
Co-chairs, Speech Synthesis Subgroup, VBWG