Proposed Group: Voice Interaction Community Group
The Voice Interaction Community Group has been proposed by Deborah Dahl:
Existing W3C voice interaction standards such as VoiceXML are based on use cases centered around telephony-based voice systems. The typical interaction style that these standards support is system-initiated directed dialog using grammars to constrain the speech recognizer. In recent years, interaction with voice applications has become much more flexible, with a user-initiated dialog style and significantly fewer constraints on spoken input.
Many of these new applications take the form of “virtual assistants”. These include general-purpose assistants (for example, Siri, Cortana, Google Now and Alexa) as well as virtual assistants with specialized domain expertise. The proposed Community Group will collect new use cases for voice interaction, develop requirements for applications such as virtual assistants and explore areas for possible standardization, possibly producing specifications if appropriate. Depending on interest, this exploration could include such topics as (1) discovery of virtual assistants with specific expertise, for example a way to find a virtual assistant that can supply weather information (2) standard formats for statistical language models for speech recognizers (3) standard representations for references to common concepts such as time (4) interoperability for conversational interfaces and (5) work on dialogue management or ‘workflow’ languages . New functionality for existing voice standards can also be a topic of discussion.
Speech application developers and voice user interface designers should be particularly interested in this group.
You are invited to support the creation of this group. Once the group has a total of five supporters, it will be launched and people can join to begin work. In order to support the group, you will need a W3C account.
Once launched, the group will no longer be listed as “proposed”; it will be in the list of current groups.
If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please send us email on site-comments@w3.org
Thank you,
W3C Community Development Team
