The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has issued the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification as a W3C Candidate Recommendation. Apple is a member of W3C, an organization that develops common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure interoperability.
Speech grammar lets voice-based application authors create rules describing what users are expected to say after listening to each application prompt. Advancement of this document to Candidate Recommendation is a statement that the specification is stable, and an invitation to the Web development community at large to make further implementations and provide technical feedback, according to Dave Raggett, W3C Voice Browser Activity lead and W3C Fellow from Openwave Systems.
The W3C Voice Browser Working Group is defining a suite of markup languages covering dialog (VoiceXML 2.0); speech synthesis (Speech Synthesis Markup Language); speech recognition (Speech Grammar, Stochastic Language Models, Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition, Natural Language Semantics); call control (Voice Browser Call Control: CCXML) and other aspects of interactive voice response applications. All of these contribute to the W3C Speech Interface Framework.
“W3C is working on expanding the Web to include access from the one billion plus telephones worldwide,” Raggett said. “People will be able to interact via spoken commands and listening to recorded speech, synthetic speech and music. This will also benefit people with visual impairments or needing Web access while keeping theirs hands and eyes free for other things.”
The Speech Recognition Grammar specification is the first of the W3C Speech Interface Framework suite to be advanced to Candidate Recommendation status.