[Kde-accessibility] XML... I think

Bill Haneman bill.haneman@sun.com
10 Jan 2003 13:21:12 +0000


Hi Pupeno and all:

We (the gnome-speech folks) looked very hard at Sable too, but in the
end ruled it out; I believe this was mostly because it appears to be a
dead-end that was superceded by VoiceXML.

It is however very similar to JSML (and VoiceXML is building on JSML
too).  VoiceXML had some potential licensing issues at one time (around
RAND) but I understand these have been solved, i.e. the upcoming
standards versions will be truly free.

I would strongly encourage you to aim for compatibility with
gnome-speech, whose upcoming version will be use JSML-2 .  Note that the
w3c is developing the standards in this area now (after Sun's submission
of JSML to the w3c as a proposed standard), and they are working on this
new version of JSML for their "Voice Browser" project.

So of the available competing standards, JSML (or its next incarnation
via the w3c) is the one which w3c is focussing on for its own
accessibility work, and the one which gnome-speech will use.

best regards,

-Bill


On Fri, 2003-01-10 at 07:05, Pupeno wrote:
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> I was thinking at how kttsd (a.k.a.: Proklam) will implement xml and I think 
> Sable will be my choice, from http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/sable/:
>   The Centre for Speech Technology Research
>   University of Edinburgh 
> 
>   The Sable Consortium
> 
>   Text-to-speech synthesizers must process text, and therefore require some 
> knowledge of text structure. While many TTS systems allow for user control by 
> means of ad hoc escape sequences, there remains to date no adequate and 
> generally agreed upon system-independent standard for marking up text for the 
> purposes of synthesis.
> 
>   Sable is a recently formed consortium aimed at providing a single standard 
> for speech synthesis markup. The consortium's principle aim is to merge the 
> two existing proposed standard, namely STML developed by Bell Labs and 
> Edinburgh, and JSML, developed by Sun.
> 
>   The present groups that are actively involved, or who have expressed an 
> interest in this project include:
> 
>   Edinburgh University
>   Bell Laboratories
>   British Telecom
>   AT&T
>   Sun Microsystems
>   Carnegie Mellon University
> 
> and the specification: 
> http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/sable/sable_spec2.html
> The good thing is that Festival is already starting to implement Sable and I 
> think Proklam implementation would be limited to:
> Parsing the xml to find the languages tag, and divide the text so each 
> language is sent to the the plug in where it belongs the same way tha saying 
> functions would have done independtly. Proklam may check xml for well 
> formeness (did I invent a word), I don't think it would check for validity 
> soon. XML parsing will be automatic as long as it's non-intrusive (and I 
> think it is) for non xml texts.
> One question, for the plug ins that doesn't support XML, should Proklam clean 
> the message (some feedback about the xml support should be get for this) or 
> the plug in should take care of it ?
> Thanks.
> - -- 
> Pupeno: pupeno@kde.org
> KDE Accessibility co-maintainer
> http://accessibility.kde.org
> - ---
> Help the hungry children of Argentina,
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-- 
Bill Haneman <bill.haneman@sun.com>