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

I have been away from the group for a long time, but have great admiration
for all you have accomplished.  What I enjoyed most about my time on the
Working Group was how deep and lasting friendships formed through the
camaraderie of trying to solve challenging technical problems by
consensus.  Jim, Dan and Scott navigated the challenges of building
consensus among such a large group with patience, kindness and periodic
doses of tough love at just the right times.

I'll never forget debating markup in the Soviet military headquarters
building in Prague while Jim sat on the table to make Gadi stop talking, or
Dan returning his steak 4 times in France because the French were unwilling
to cook it through, or helping TV Raman navigate the cobblestones of
Budapest to find a Greek meal, or sharing a drink with Scott in awe of the
fact that Sweden runs fiber to most homes, or trying to comprehend that
2,000 Lira equaled one dollar in Italy, or simply sipping orange juice on
the patio of the Sofitel in Cannes looking out over the Mediterranean.

You all expanded my understanding of both the world of technology and the
world in general in a way I can only hope to pay forward some day.

Cheers,
Brad

-----Original Message-----
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, 双志伟, 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
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Sent: Saturday, September 26, 2015 8:26 AM
To: w3c-voice-wg@w3.org
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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
2.0http://www.w3.org/TR/voicexml20

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

2015-08-11
XPath Data Model for SCXMLhttp://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 valueshttp://www.w3.org/TR/ssml-sayas

1998-01-28
Voice Browsershttp://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