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 2.0
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