15 January 2007

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced that it will be offering wider support for world languages in web-based voice applications.

Workshops have taken place in Beijing, China and Heraklion, Greece, which have contributed to the first public working draft of Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) version 1.1.

SSML is designed to offer improved speech synthesis systems for accessibility technologies and applications, as well as seeking to develop standards.

W3C explains: "The essential role of the markup language is to provide authors of synthesisable content a standard way to control aspects of speech such as pronunciation, volume, pitch, rate, etc across different synthesis-capable platforms."

The recent workshop in Greece incorporated experts from several fields, including linguists, speech synthesis specialists and system developers, aiming to provide enhanced support for non-Latin languages such as Turkish, Arabic, Russian, Hindi, Farsee and Bengali.

This data could then be applied to implement accessibility improvements in countries where these languages are spoken.

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