W3C Invites Implementations of Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS)

Members of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group have published the
Candidate Recommendation for "Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS)
Version 1.0." Implementation feedback is welcome through 11-April-2008.
A PLS 1.0 Implementation Report Plan is available Implementation Report
objectives are to verify that the specification is implementable; testing
must demonstrate interoperability of implementations of the specification.
A test report must indicate the outcome of each test. Possible outcomes
are pass, fail, or not-implemented. The Pronunciation Lexicon Specification
provides the basis for describing pronunciation information for use in
speech recognition and speech synthesis, for use in tuning applications,
e.g. for proper names that have irregular pronunciations. PLS is designed
to enable interoperable specification of pronunciation information for
both Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-To-Speech (TTS) engines,
which internally provide extensive high quality lexicons with pronunciation
information for many words or phrases. To ensure a maximum coverage of
the words or phrases used by an application, application-specific
pronunciations may be required. The Working Group has also updated Speech
Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.1. 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.
Changes from the previous draft include addition of new "type" attribute
with value of "ruby", change of references to "pronunciation alphabet"
to be "pronunciation scheme", and modified attribute's names of audio
element.