The telephone was invented in the 1870s and continues to be a very important means for people to communicate with each other. The Web by comparison is very recent, but is rapidly becoming 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. Historically W3C's standardization work on Voice technology of the Voice Browser Working Group was driven by the needs of call center telephony. However, today's mobile devices use not only the visual user interface but also the speech interface for accessing the Web, so the work is now driven by mobile device needs as well. Visual interfaces are very useful for accessing the Web but there are several possible barriers of communication only with the visual interface on small devices, and Voice technology could be a promising solution to the barriers. For example, Voice is available on any kind of phones and in all kinds of languages. Also it requires much less training to use since it is more natural than usual visual user interfaces.
The Voice Browser Working Group published the Call Control Extensible Markup Language Version 1 as a Proposed Recommendation on 12 May 2011. The group also published Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) 3.0, the next generation dialog framework, as the tenth Working Draft on 16 December 2010. On the other hand, the eighth and ninth Working Draft of State Chart XML (SCXML) was published on 26 May 2011.
CCXML, will move to Recommendation in June. The next draft of VoiceXML 3.0 is to be published shortly, as well as the Last Call Working Draft of SCXML.
The group will hold the next face-to-face meeting on 20-24 June in Orlando, collocated with the Multimodal Interaction Working Group face-to-face meeting.
| Group | Chair | Team Contact | Charter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Voice Browser Working Group (participants) | Daniel Burnett | Kazuyuki Ashimura, Matt Womer | Chartered until 31 May 2012 |
This Activity Statement was prepared for TPAC 2011 per section 5 of the W3C Process Document. Generated from group data.
Matt Womer, Voice Browser Activity Lead
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