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=92s 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.

-=3D- 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,
>=20
>=20
> 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.
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> 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.
>=20
> 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.