Speaking of Standards

As I sit here reviewing papers for the upcoming W3C Biometrics Workshop, it occurs to me that I should give some background for this Workshop.

The two standards organizations I’ve had the most involvement with, IETF and W3C, have been adding voice biometrics to their standards in fits and starts for several years now.

MRCPv1, a widely-implemented protocol (API) for interacting with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) engines, did not contain support for Speaker Identification and Verification (SIV), but one of its extensions did.

Portions of this extension made their way into MRCPv2, the standards-track successor to MRCPv1.

The W3C Voice Browser Working Group briefly considered some SIV markup for VoiceXML 2, but there wasn’t sufficient support at the time.

Now, the Working Group is reviewing SIV features for addition to VoiceXML 3. Although the feature set of a W3C specification is not truly set until the specification reaches the Recommendation Stage, this time there appears to be sufficient interest in adding SIV primitives to the language.

To get more information from the knowledgeable public, W3C is holding a workshop to “identify and prioritize directions for SIV standards work as a means of making SIV more useful in current and emerging markets. ” The workshop will be held in early March at SRI in Menlo Park, California.

Although the paper submission deadline has passed, if you were unaware of this workshop and are dying to attend, please email member-siv-submit@w3.org as described in the Call for Participation.