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

This is terrific news!  The VBWG has made significant contributions to the IVR and call center markets.  Jim Larson, Scott McGlashan, Dan Burnett, and the many members of the group over the years are to be commended for their efforts in standardizing the technology and promoting the widespread adoption of speech applications.  The impact has literally changed an industry.  At the same time, the technology has continued to move forward at a rapid pace.  It is interesting to reread the original charter of the working group which focused on bringing speech into HTML and to then compare those early objectives against what is now possible.  It’s been an interesting journey and the VBWG has had a significant role in removing roadblocks and speeding the trip.

Thanks again to the chairs of the group and the many members for their efforts and for many fruitful and educational discussions.

-=- Jerry


On Sat, 26 Sep 2015 11:26:24, 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.

Received on Wednesday, 30 September 2015 14:16:52 UTC