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

Dan / all,

Reading that is a bit of a shock to whom, including me, have attended some =
many conf calls, f2f meetings and TPACs.

I joined the WG in 2000/01 and I met there Jim and many of you. I was alrea=
dy acquainted with Scott from the previous EU project SUNDIAL, what a loss =
not having him with us now.

The Voice Browser was a great place where starting to work on standards, wi=
th some many sort of discussions, fights, but then lots of scribbling durin=
g the dinners to seek for a solution. I would like to thanks all those peop=
le, from the early 2000 until now. I think close to 100, or little less. A =
sort of a big family and a true cross-road of technology and friendship.

Thanks to you and all the people who chaired the group, all the authors and=
 co-authors, all the IR people and W3C close groups (Richard Ishida, the WA=
Is, etc). I won't forget Debbie who contributed in VBWG and chaired MMIWG. =
Last but not least Kaz, DaveR, Felix, Philip and other from the W3C.

We did a great work all together.

Paolo Baggia,
Nuance (and formerly Loquendo)
-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Burnett [mailto:[email protected]]=20
Sent: sabato 26 settembre 2015 17:26
To: [email protected] (group); Voice Public List
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 y=
ears,


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 accomplishment=
s of the WG.

The Voice Browser Working Group has been one of the longest-running and mos=
t successful working groups at W3C, both in terms of its list of specificat=
ions and its whole-hearted adoption by its target industry.

Under the leadership of Jim Larson, the group started in 1999 with a goal o=
f 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 Interacti=
ve Voice Response (IVR) application development.  At the time, nearly all s=
uch development was done using proprietary software running on custom hardw=
are systems that lived in phone company Central Office buildings.  Applicat=
ion development took many months, and new features often took years to make=
 their way onto the hardware platforms.  Additionally, Automatic Speech Rec=
ognition (ASR, or Voice Recognition) technology suffered from a lack of ado=
pted standards, even though many of the APIs were similar at their core due=
 to agreements in the research community.  This made it difficult for compe=
tition 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 alrea=
dy 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 H=
TML, 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 w=
ith their existing back-end systems.  Simultaneously, it created a uniform =
way to use ASR engines, with a common lexical grammar language (SRGS), a co=
mmon semantic processor language (SISR), a common speech synthesis language=
 (SSML), a common lexicon format (PLS), and the amazing innovation of a con=
fidence threshold value constrained to range from 0 to 100, something consi=
dered almost impossible at the time.
Most importantly, VoiceXML introduced the web model to the automated call c=
enter environment, along with its associated reductions in development cost=
 and time and deployment cost and time. Within a few short years VoiceXML-b=
ased systems dominated the IVR industry, replacing all existing custom hard=
ware 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, an=
d 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 htt=
p://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/sp=
eech-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/voicex=
ml21/

2007-04-05
Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition (SISR) Version 1.0 http://ww=
w.w3.org/TR/semantic-interpretation/

2004-09-07
Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.0 http://www.w3.org/TR/sp=
eech-synthesis

2004-03-16
Speech Recognition Grammar Specification Version 1.0 http://www.w3.org/TR/s=
peech-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/voicex=
ml30/


I would personally like to thank all the members of the Voice Browser Worki=
ng Group over the years, with special mention to
- Jim Barnett and his team for helping us finish SCXML, our final Recommend=
ation,
- Kaz Ashimura for his years of dedicated work as our Team Contact, and
- Jim Larson and our recently departed friend, Scott McGlashan, for their o=
utstanding vision and leadership.

Thank you.


Dan Burnett
Chair, Voice Browser Working Group