RE: Thoughts and thanks as the VBWG comes to a close

Thank you to Dan and Jim and Scott for co-chairing the group over time, and to our various editors in chief - Jim Barnett, RJ Auburn, Dan Burnett, ˫־ΰ, Paolo Baggia, Matt Oshry, Luc Van Tichelen, Andrew Hunt, Scott McGlashan - and to all of the various participants.

The 9 specifications and numerous notes transformed the IVR industry, but also positively brought speech standards to the wider visual and multimodal web.  These standards still positively impact many millions of people (if not more) each day.  

In addition to the impressive voice standards and working group notes written below, the Voice Browser also gave birth to the ideas behind the CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) specification, which is now a critical part of the wider web standards (The Voice Browser Working Group note http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/NOTE-access-control-20050613/ has evolved over time to a full W3C Rec with wide implementation in http://www.w3.org/TR/access-control/).

May everyone continue to have success in their future work.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Burnett [mailto:dburnett@voxeo.com] 
Sent: Saturday, September 26, 2015 8:26 AM
To: w3c-voice-wg@w3.org (group); Voice Public List
Subject: ALL: Thoughts and thanks as the VBWG comes to a close

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 19:34:56 UTC