Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.1

W3C announced that members of the Voice Browser Working Group have
released an updated Working Draft for the "Speech Synthesis Markup
Language (SSML) Version 1.1" specification. Changes from the previous
draft include the usage of XML 1.1 and IRIs, and the specification of
voice selection and language speaking control. The W3C Voice Browser
Working Group has sought to develop standards to enable access to the
Web using spoken interaction. The Speech Synthesis Markup Language
Specification is one of these standards and is designed to provide a
rich, XML-based markup language for assisting the generation of
synthetic speech in Web and other applications. The essential role of
the markup language is to provide authors of synthesizable content a
standard way to control aspects of speech such as pronunciation, volume,
pitch, rate, etc. across different synthesis-capable platforms. The
intended use of SSML is to improve the quality of synthesized content.
Different markup elements impact different stages of the synthesis
process. The markup may be produced either automatically, for instance
via XSLT or CSS3 from an XHTML document, or by human authoring. Markup
may be present within a complete SSML document or as part of a fragment
embedded in another language, although no interactions with other
languages are specified as part of SSML itself. Most of the markup
included in SSML is suitable for use by the majority of content
developers; however, some advanced features like 'phoneme' and 'prosody'
(e.g., for speech contour design) may require specialized knowledge.
SSML Version 1.1 improves on W3C's SSML 1.0 Recommendation by adding
support for more conventions and practices of the world's natural
(human) languages.