Re: ALL: Thoughts and thanks as the VBWG comes to a close

Dan, 

While I have watched this mostly from the sidelines, it has been an honor to have been a part of it from the genesis of VoiceXML and the watch the tremendous stewardship of the W3C VBWG and its leadership over the years. 

These are still some of my proudest and most satisfying technical contributions. 

Thank you to all who have given their time and creativity over so many years to the compendium of recommendations, especially to my colleagues and friends who helped create VoiceXML 1.0 and an extra thanks to you Dan for your many many contributions over the years and for this wonderful note. 

Gerald Karam 

Still with AT&T 😀

Sent from my iPhone

> On Sep 26, 2015, at 11:28 AM, Dan Burnett <dburnett@voxeo.com> wrote:
> 
> To all of you who have helped in the Voice Browser Working Group over the years,
> 
> 
> The Voice Browser Working Group will be closing shortly, but before it does, it is appropriate to say a few words about the history and accomplishments of the WG.
> 
> The Voice Browser Working Group has been one of the longest-running and most successful working groups at W3C, both in terms of its list of specifications and its whole-hearted adoption by its target industry.
> 
> Under the leadership of Jim Larson, the group started in 1999 with a goal of taking the VoiceXML 1.0 specification created by IBM, Motorola, AT&T, and Lucent and turning it into a world-wide standard for call center Interactive Voice Response (IVR) application development.  At the time, nearly all such development was done using proprietary software running on custom hardware systems that lived in phone company Central Office buildings.  Application development took many months, and new features often took years to make their way onto the hardware platforms.  Additionally, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR, or Voice Recognition) technology suffered from a lack of adopted standards, even though many of the APIs were similar at their core due to agreements in the research community.  This made it difficult for competition in the ASR space to flourish since each ASR engine had a custom API that IVR application developers had to use.  Meanwhile, the HTML revolution had already resulted in web-based customer self-care, so enterprises already had a direct line between their customers and their back end systems.
> Enter VoiceXML.  Extending XML in the way W3C, at the time, was extending HTML, via XML elements with associated rendering semantics, VoiceXML created a uniform language for IVR development that allowed enterprises to use the web model of resource naming, caching, and fetching for easy integration with their existing back-end systems.  Simultaneously, it created a uniform way to use ASR engines, with a common lexical grammar language (SRGS), a common semantic processor language (SISR), a common speech synthesis language (SSML), a common lexicon format (PLS), and the amazing innovation of a confidence threshold value constrained to range from 0 to 100, something considered almost impossible at the time.
> Most importantly, VoiceXML introduced the web model to the automated call center environment, along with its associated reductions in development cost and time and deployment cost and time. Within a few short years VoiceXML-based systems dominated the IVR industry, replacing all existing custom hardware systems on the market with racks of general compute servers as we know them today.
> VoiceXML has been an unqualified success that has directly led to continued innovations such as those from the cloud IVR industry of Twilio, Tropo, and others.
> 
> During its lifetime the Voice Browser produced the following specifications:
> 
> Recommendations:
> ----------------
> 2015-09-01
> State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction
> http://www.w3.org/TR/scxml/

> 
> 2011-07-05
> Voice Browser Call Control: CCXML Version 1.0
> http://www.w3.org/TR/ccxml/

> 
> 2010-09-07
> Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.1
> http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis11/

> 
> 2008-10-14
> Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) Version 1.0
> http://www.w3.org/TR/pronunciation-lexicon/

> 
> 2007-06-19
> Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 2.1
> http://www.w3.org/TR/voicexml21/

> 
> 2007-04-05
> Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition (SISR) Version 1.0
> http://www.w3.org/TR/semantic-interpretation/

> 
> 2004-09-07
> Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.0
> http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis

> 
> 2004-03-16
> Speech Recognition Grammar Specification Version 1.0
> http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-grammar

> 
> 2004-03-16
> Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) Version 2.0
> http://www.w3.org/TR/voicexml20

> 
> Group Notes:
> ------------
> 2015-08-11
> DOM Event I/O Processor for SCXML
> http://www.w3.org/TR/scxml-dom-iop/

> 
> 2015-08-11
> XPath Data Model for SCXML
> http://www.w3.org/TR/scxml-xpath-dm/

> 
> 2009-12-08
> Mobile Web for Social Development Roadmap
> http://www.w3.org/TR/mw4d-roadmap/

> 
> 2005-05-26
> SSML 1.0 say-as attribute values
> http://www.w3.org/TR/ssml-sayas

> 
> 1998-01-28
> Voice Browsers
> http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-voice

> 
> 
> Working Drafts:
> -------------
> 2010-12-16
> Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0
> http://www.w3.org/TR/voicexml30/

> 
> 
> I would personally like to thank all the members of the Voice Browser Working Group over the years, with special mention to
> - Jim Barnett and his team for helping us finish SCXML, our final Recommendation,
> - Kaz Ashimura for his years of dedicated work as our Team Contact, and
> - Jim Larson and our recently departed friend, Scott McGlashan, for their outstanding vision and leadership.
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> 
> Dan Burnett
> Chair, Voice Browser Working Group
>

Received on Monday, 28 September 2015 03:07:43 UTC