W3C recently opened its India office, in order to accelerate the development of local web and has now announced extending SSML to Asian languages.
The Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML 1.1) Recommendation provides control over voice selection as well as speech characteristics such as pronunciation, volume, and pitch. SSML is part of W3C’s Speech Interface Framework for building voice applications, which also includes the widely deployed VoiceXML and the Pronunciation Lexicon (for providing speech engines guidance on proper pronunciation).
"With SSML 1.1 there is an intentional focus on Asian language support, including Chinese languages, Japanese, Thai, Urdu, and others, to provide a wide deployment potential – source
New features included in 1.1 are
- Improved lexicon activation control
- Better linkage with PLS lexicons
- Introduction of a Pronunciation Alphabet Registry to allow use of standardized pinyin, jyutping, and other language-specific pronunciation alphabets in addition to the IPA default
- New <w> element for marking word boundaries
- Improved author control of behavior upon xml:lang/voice selection mismatch
- Clearer separation between xml:lang (document text content) and voice selection
SSML 1.1 Supports
- Token/word boundaries
- Phonetic alphabets
- Tones
- Part of Speech support
- Text w/multiple languages (separate control of xml:lang and voice)
- Subword annotation (partial)
- Syllable-level markup (partial)
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VoiceXML Competition : VoicePHP
VoicePHP a competition for VoiceXML ? That’s like saying PHP is a competition for HTML.
@nilesh
great to know we are still in love with Voice/Speech Tech
@Nilesh – VoicePHP is a competition to VoiceXML. Don’t go by name. Check out the details at voicephp.com
Thanks for the link. I hadn’t seen that before. It looks like you are right. VoicePHP does seem incompatible with VoiceXML and hence a competitor.
However, that makes it TringMe specific because the majority of Voice browsers out there support VoiceXML only. So taking the PHP/HTML analogy, it is as if TringMe has written a browser which does not support HTML and wants us to write apps in its own custom mark-up language. Much less attractive, in my opinion.
@Nilesh
am in support of voicexml. More than voicexml speech user interface and ivr.
Voicephp is interesting example of non-standard product/service and technically they can render voicexml output (as php does !) but i think they never want to.
as you already aware they may also take path like voiceobjects (acquired by Voxeo) but i dont know why.
This is interesting. 2 years back had planned SSML workshop in Hyd, It really goes well.
My previous comment was lost here, but instead of repeating my views here, let me quickly request you to checkout, “VoiceXML – Good, Bad & the Ugly” – http://is.gd/f3DST
Yusuf
@Yusuf
1. voicephp may be better but not standard.
2. voicephp is not rendering voicexml presently, but if framework tweaked, can do it (i think so!).
3. server side is the **real use** however if voicephp can **ALSO** render voicexml (like php can also render html/xml) it can be more useful. It will solve two problem a) standradize output, b) easy -fast development.
Hi,
Personally, I think standardization is best. VoiceXML or for that matter any other standardized version will have some bloat as they have to cater to all possible scenarios, but the alternative to standards is non standard bits spread throughout without any chance of portability.If you decide to use the technology of a particular company you are stuck with it and where will you go if the company winds up.
That said, the current trend has been to provide cloud based IVR services by providing telephony functions through web services. There are many players in the market like Tropo, Twilio,KooKoo etc.Even voicePHP can be put under this banner. Interested people can also check out http://www.kookoo.in and http://www.kookoo.in/twittervoice for an example application. To see more of thoughts on this you can visit http://cloudtelephony.blogspot.com/ .
Hi Guys,
I think I put too many urls in my host and so my content was lost.Anyway, what I wanted to tell is covered here http://bit.ly/b02oDU .