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

Kazuyuki,

I think this is a great idea, would you be willing to build a public 
mailing list?

Regards,

-Jim

On 9/28/2015 9:17 PM, Kazuyuki Ashimura wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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
>     <mailto:jim42@larson-tech.com>]
>     Sent: Monday, September 28, 2015 11:24 AM
>     To: Dan Burnett; w3c-voice-wg@w3.org <mailto: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
>