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

It would be good to keep the public list up too, since people ask questions about recommendations on the list from time to time.  The recommendations say things like: “Comments for this specification are welcomed to www-voice@w3.org (archives).”

From: Kazuyuki Ashimura [mailto:ashimura@w3.org]
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2015 7:20 AM
To: Jim Larson
Cc: Deborah Dahl; Jim Barnett; James Larson; w3c-voice-wg@w3.org; Voice Public List
Subject: Re: ALL: Thoughts and thanks as the VBWG comes to a close REUNION?

On Tue, Sep 29, 2015 at 11:08 PM, Jim Larson <jim42@larson-tech.com<mailto:jim42@larson-tech.com>> wrote:
Kazuyuki,

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

Please let me check within the Team.

Kazuyuki



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<tel:%2B81%203%203516%202504>





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