Per section 6 Working Groups, Interest Groups, and Coordination Groups of the W3C Process, this charter, and any changes to it, take effect by way of an announcement to the W3C Membership via w3c-ac-members.
The telephone was invented in the 1870s by Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell, and continues to be a very important means for us to communicate with each other. The Web by comparison is very recent, but has rapidly become a competing communications channel. The convergence of telecommunications and the Web is now bringing the benefits of Web technology to the telephone, enabling Web developers to create applications that can be accessed via any telephone, and allowing people to interact with these applications via speech and telephone keypads. The W3C Speech Interface Framework is a suite of markup specifications aimed at realizing this goal. It covers voice dialogs, speech synthesis, speech recognition, telephony call control for voice browsers and other requirements for interactive voice response applications, including use by people with hearing or speaking impairments.
Some possible applications include:
The Voice Browser Working Group should be of interest to a wide range of organizations involved in the design, support and infrastructure for interactive voice response applications. These include companies providing call center solutions, speech techologies, and application design and hosting services.
The Voice Browser Working Group was first established on 26 March 1999 and subsequently rechartered on 25 September 2002. The Working Group is now being re-chartered for a further two years to continue its work on maintaining and enhancing the W3C Speech Interface Framework suite of specifications.
Here is a list of documents produced by the Voice Browser Activity
All work items carried out under this Charter must fall within the scope defined by this section.
This Working Group is chartered to last until 31 January 2007. The first face to face meeting after re-chartering is planned to be held during the Boston W3C Technical Plenary in early 2005.
Here is a list of milestones identified at the time of re-chartering. Others may be added later at the discretion of the Working Group, provided they fall within the scope as described in section 4. The dates are for guidance only and subject to change.
These are related activities that we may need to interact with in ways to be determined, for example, to ask them to review our draft specifications, and for us to take advantage of their work to fulfil our needs. Collaboration across working groups will be essential to realizing the mission of the Voice Browser Activity.
These are W3C activities that may be asked to review documents produced by the Voice Browser Working Group, or which may be involved in closer collaboration as appropriate to achieving the goals of the Charter.
This is an indication of external groups with complementary goals to the Voice Browser activity.
To become a participant of the Working Group, a representative of a W3C Member organization must be nominated by their Advisory Committee Representative as described in the W3C Process. The associated IPR disclosure must further satisfy the requirements specified in the W3C Patent Policy (5 February 2004 Version).
Experts from appropriate communities may also be invited to join the working group, following the provisions for this in the W3C Process.
Each Working Group participant is expected to contribute 20%, or at least a day per week to this group.
All proceedings of the Working Group (mail archives, telecon minutes, ftf minutes) will be available to W3C Members.
Working Group participants are not obligated to participate in every work item, however the Working Group as a whole is responsible for reviewing and accepting all work items.
The archived member-only mailing list w3c-voice-wg@w3.org is the primary means of discussion within the group.
Certain topics need coordination with external groups. The Chair and the Working Group can agree to discuss these topics on a public mailing list. The archived mailing list www-voice@w3.org is used for public discussion of W3C proposals for Voice Browsers, and Working Group members are encouraged to subscribe. To subscribe send a message with the word subscribe in the subject line to www-voice-request@w3.org.
The Working Group page will record the history of the group, provides access to the archives, meeting minutes, updated schedule of deliverables, membership list, and relevant documents and resources. The page will be available to W3C Members and Invited Experts, and will be maintained by the W3C team contacts in collaboration with the Working Group Chair.
A weekly one-hour phone conference will be held. The exact details, dates and times will be published in advance on the working group page. Additional phone conferences may be scheduled as necessary on specific topics. An IRC channel may be used to supplement teleconferences. Meeting records should be made available in a timely fashion, in accordance with the W3C Process.
Face to face meetings will be arranged 3 to 4 times a year. The Chair will make Working Group meeting dates and locations available to the group in a timely manner according to the W3C Process. The Chair is also responsible for providing publicly accessible summaries of Working Group face to face meetings, which will be announced on www-voice@w3.org.
This is expected to be a large working group. At the end of the previous charter, the Working Group had 88 participants from 47 organizations. To make effective use of this number of people, work may be carried out in task forces following the W3C Process "Requirements for All Working, Interest, and Coordination Groups". We also expect a large public review group that will participate in the public mailing list discussions.
The W3C Team will be responsible for the mailing lists, public and working group pages, and for liaison with the W3C communications staff for the publication of working drafts. W3C team members are expected to adopt the same requirements for meeting attendance, timely response and information disclosure as are required of W3C Members. The W3C Team expects to allocate the equivalent of 100% of a full-time person to this work for the duration of this working group.
This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy (5 February 2004 Version). To promote the widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue Recommendations that can be implemented, according to this policy, on a Royalty-Free basis.