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

Hi Dan, Jim Larson, Jim Barnett, Debbie and all,

I really appreciate all the great contribution made by the group
to the standardization of voice technologies, and am proud that
I could be a part of the work.

By the way, as you know, the group is closing, and that means
the VBWG mailing lists (both the Member list and the public list)
will be also closed.

So I think maybe it would make sense to have another ML for
the VBWG alumni to continue some more discussion, e.g, on
the possible reunion at SpeechTEK.

What d you think?

Maybe the ML could be a public one.

Thanks,

Kazuyuki



On Tue, Sep 29, 2015 at 3:00 AM, Deborah Dahl <
dahl@conversational-technologies.com> wrote:

> Dear Dan,
> Thank you for your note and the summary of the VBWG's history and
> specifications. The list of specifications that the group published is
> indeed impressive, but it's even more impressive when you know, as the VBWG
> members well know, how each feature of each specification was thought
> through, debated, revised, wordsmithed, and tested before it became part of
> the standard. The specifications look on the surface like a dry list of
> MUST's and SHOULD's but that appearance doesn't do justice to the long
> discussions and late nights in far-flung places that led to their creation.
> All of this hard work and care resulted in an incredible suite of standards
> that laid the foundation for a whole industry. I only wish Scott were still
> with us today to share these final thoughts.
> Jim, that's a wonderful idea to get together at SpeechTEK. I would love to
> do that.
> best,
> Debbie
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Larson [mailto:jim42@larson-tech.com]
> Sent: Monday, September 28, 2015 11:24 AM
> To: Dan Burnett; w3c-voice-wg@w3.org (group); Voice Public List
> Subject: Re: ALL: Thoughts and thanks as the VBWG comes to a close REUNION?
>
> Thanks so much for participating in one of the most successful W3C working
> groups.  We achieved much, had meetings at interesting places, and had
> great
> times.  Thank you.
>
> Let me know if you would like to get together for a WBWG reunion at
> SpeechTEK, May 23-25 in Washington DC, by indicating your availability at
> one or more of these dates/times:
>
> Sunday evening May 22
> Monday lunch May 23
> Monday evening May 23
> Tuesday lunch May 24
> Tuesday evening May 24
> Wednesday lunch May 25
> Wednesday evening May 25
>
> -Jim
>
>
>
> On 9/26/2015 8:26 AM, Dan Burnett 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
> >
>
>
>
>
>
>
>


-- 
Kaz Ashimura, W3C Staff Contact for Auto, WoT, TV, MMI, Voice and Geo
Tel: +81 3 3516 2504