*Speech Standards: Lessons Learnt DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93134*

*Human 4.0 - From Biology to Cybernetic*

**3. W3C VBWG standards**

the voice standards.

speech grammar.

From its creation, W3C VBWG started to attract all the companies and labs active in that space. The companies included speech technology providers (at that time L&H, Philips, Nuance, SpeechWorks, Loquendo, and Entropic), research labs (MIT, Rutgers, AT&T Bell Labs, and CSELT/TILAB), large telcos (Lucent, AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Telecom Italia, Motorola, and Nokia), large players (Microsoft, HP, Intel, IBM, and Unisys), and IVR vendors (Avaya, Genesys, Comverse, and CISCO). In addition, newly created companies such as voice platform providers (PipeBeach, Voxpilot, Vocalocity, VoiceGenie, and Voxeo), voice application host (HeyAnita, BeVocal, and Tellme), and many more joined the effort. One of the first actions of the W3C VBWG was to acknowledge the contribution of the VoiceXML Forum [17] (founded by AT&T, Lucent, Motorola, and IBM) of a new markup language called VoiceXML 1.0 [18] of their design. From this point on, the W3C VBWG focused on completing VoiceXML with additional features. However, a wise decision was made to create a family of interoperable standards instead of a monolithic language. These standard languages are those described in Section 3. At the same time, the VoiceXML Forum took on a complementary role in the evolution of the VoiceXML ecosystem. It focused on education, evangelization, and support of the adoption of this family of standards. Among the major achieve-

ments of the VoiceXML Forum are the following two programs:

1.0, and SSML 1.0 with eight more platforms certified.

• The Platform Certification Program to allow platform developers to thoroughly test and certify that their platforms support all standard features. The first certification program was limited to VoiceXML 2.0 with a large adoption of 26 platforms certified. It was then extended to also certify VoiceXML 2.1, SRGS

• The Developers Certification Program to allow developers to certify their competence in the VoiceXML architecture and in the correlated standards.

All the materials produced are still available in the VoiceXML Forum Web site [17].

The W3C VBWG, supported by the VoiceXML Forum, accelerated a cooperative effort to create the foundations of a new generation of voice applications based on public standards. In a short time, an incredible sequence of Working Drafts was published, demonstrating the energy and creativity underlying the development of

In March 2004, after less than 4 years from the start of VBWG, the first group of complete standards, known as W3C Recommendations, was released. It includes VoiceXML 2.0 [19] for authoring voice applications; SRGS 1.0 [20] for defining the syntax of speech grammars; and SSML 1.0 [21] for controlling speech synthesis (or text-to-speech, TTS). A few years later, in April/June 2007, a second round of W3C Recommendations was released, which includes VoiceXML 2.1 [22], which completes VoiceXML 2.0 with a limited number of new features; and SISR 1.0 [23], which standardizes the creation of a meaning representation from a SRGS 1.0

The work continued in the following years. SSML 1.0 was revised to version 1.1 [24] to improve the internationalization of speech synthesis in other regions of the world, including India and Eastern Asia, and PLS 1.0 [25], which supports the description of pronunciation lexicons, a shared resource for both SRGS 1.0 and SSML 1.0/1.1 resources. Finally, CCXML 1.0 [26] was released as a real-time

**50**

language to implement telephony and VoIP call control in a voice browser platform, while SCXML 1.0 [27] as a general-purpose event-based state machine language that can be used for defining the dialog manager, and other components of a speech system. A comprehensive introduction to SCXML 1.0 is available in [28]. In the rest of this section, these languages will be briefly introduced.
