new W3C Community Group on Voice Interaction

Hi,

I wanted to let you know about a new Community Group that was just launched
on the topic of "Voice Interaction" [1].

Here's the mission statement.

 

Existing W3C voice interaction standards such as VoiceXML are based on use
cases centered around telephony-based voice systems. The typical interaction
style that these standards support is system-initiated directed dialog using
grammars to constrain the speech recognizer. In recent years, interaction
with voice applications has become much more flexible, with a user-initiated
dialog style and significantly fewer constraints on spoken input. Many of
these new applications take the form of "virtual assistants". These include
general-purpose assistants (for example, Siri, Cortana, Google Now and
Alexa) as well as virtual assistants with specialized domain expertise. The
proposed Community Group will collect new use cases for voice interaction,
develop requirements for applications such as virtual assistants and explore
areas for possible standardization, possibly producing specifications if
appropriate. Depending on interest, this exploration could include such
topics as (1) discovery of virtual assistants with specific expertise, for
example a way to find a virtual assistant that can supply weather
information (2) standard formats for statistical language models for speech
recognizers (3) standard representations for references to common concepts
such as time (4) interoperability for conversational interfaces and (5) work
on dialogue management or 'workflow' languages . New functionality for
existing voice standards can also be a topic of discussion. Speech
application developers and voice user interface designers should be
particularly interested in this group.

 

You can join from the group's home page, and you can find out more about
Community Groups in general on the Community Group home page [2].

 

[1] https://www.w3.org/community/voiceinteraction/ 

[2] https://www.w3.org/community/