[whatwg] Speech input element

[Doug Schepers]

Hi, Bjorn-

Bjorn Bringert wrote (on 5/17/10 9:05 AM):
> Back in December there was a discussion about web APIs for speech
> recognition and synthesis that saw a decent amount of interest
> (http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-December/thread.html#24281).
> Based on that discussion, we would like to propose a simple API for
> speech recognition, using a new<input type="speech">  element. An
> informal spec of the new API, along with some sample apps and use
> cases can be found at:
> http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AaYxrITemjbxZGNmZzc5cHpfM2Ryajc5Zmhx&hl=en.
>
> It would be very helpful if you could take a look and share your
> comments. Our next steps will be to implement the current design, get
> some feedback from web developers, continue to tweak, and seek
> standardization as soon it looks mature enough and/or other vendors
> become interested in implementing it.

This is important work, thanks for taking it on and bringing it to a 
wider discussion forum.  Here's a couple of other venues you might also 
consider discussing it, above and beyond discussion on the WHATWG list:

* W3C just launched a new Audio Incubator Group (Audio XG), as a forum 
to discuss various aspects of audio on the Web.  The Audio XG is not 
intended to produce Recommendation-track specifications like this 
(though they will likely prototype and write a draft spec for a 
read-write audio API), but it could serve a role in helping work out use 
cases and requirements, reviewing specs, and so forth.  I'm not totally 
sure that this is relevant to your interests, but I thought I would 
bring it up.

* The Voice Browser Working Group is very interested in bringing their 
work and experience into the graphical browser world, so you should work 
with them or get their input.  As I understand it, some of them plan to 
join the Audio XG, too (specifically to talk about speech synthesis in 
the larger context), so that might be one forum to have some 
conversations.  VoiceXML is rather different than X/HTML or the browser 
DOM, and the participants in the VBWG don't necessarily have the right 
experience in graphical browser approaches, so I think there's an 
opportunity for good conversation and cross-pollination here.

[1] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/audio/
[2] http://www.w3.org/Voice/

Regards-
-Doug