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W3C Seeks Feedback on VoiceXML
jdaly writes: "Today, W3C announced that VoiceXML 2.0 has been issued as a first public Working Draft. Press materials went across various wire services. Rather than send simply a press release here, W3C would like to give more specific information of interest to Slashdot readers. Of note is a section from the "Status of the document" section of VoiceXML 2.0 draft:
"This document seeks Member and public comment on both the technical design and the patent licensing issues arising out of the disclosure and licensing statements that have been made. Our decision to publish this first public working draft has been made to secure early comments from the community, but does not imply that all questions of patent licensing have been resolved or clarified. They must be resolved or work on this document in W3C will stop.
As things stand at the time of publication of this specification, implementations conforming to this specification may require royalty bearing licenses for essential IPR. Further information can be found in the patent disclosures page. The patent policy for W3C as a whole is under wide discussion. A set of commitments by all participants in the Voice Browser Activity to royalty free is a possibility for the future but has NOT been made at time of publication."
As IPR issues are important to Slashdot readers, we are striving to make this information available to them as soon as possible. W3C strongly encourages those with an interest in this specification to consider using the comment list, www-voice@w3.org, which is archived. There is no deadline for comments on a first public Working Draft.
Regards, Janet Daly, W3C"
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
...that when we are browsing /. we will actually hear "first post"?
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A talking webserver..now instead of having to guess if its overheating, has a virus, or is under a denial of service attack, it can tell you. Does this have anything to do with that emotional car that was posted a while ago? I don't want a webserver under my control crying or frowning at me...a server farm is scary enough without having talking servers..
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I thought that feedback was one of the biggest problems with voices. My ears still ring from a Who concert years ago!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Sorry couldn't resist.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
OpenVXI 2.0 was released just last week. According to the message on the VXI-discuss mailing list:
There is currently support for Windows (binaries are included) and Linux. Developers are currently working to add Solaris and Mac OS X.
NOTE: This is a VoiceXML interpreter. A real system would require a full speech recognition engine and a full text-to-speech implementation. SpeechWorks International ships a commercial version which connects to their recognizer and TTS products. This is a good playground for experimentation.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
I back the view that the code _should_ be patented, but guaranteed royalty-free. AFAICR, Oracle stick to this policy. Even better, to transfer the patent to the W3C in trust.
The reason being that obtaining a patent is far easier than not owning it and then having to prove prior art in court when some disreputable company patents it later and sues you (the inventor)!
Defensive patenting, basically.
Sorry, another post was posted while I was typing mine, announcing an open source VoiceXML interpreter. I suppose I spoke about 2 minutes too soon =)
Here's the link for OpenVXI 2.0.
when the rain comes, they run and hide their heads. they might as well be dead.
As tightly bound up in patents as voice/sound is, unless W3C takes a truly RAND stance (free, no less), they may as well get out of the way. You may be looking at "non-discriminatory" license fees of $10,000 from half a dozen big companies. That's $10,000 EACH. (Or maybe more, depending on how greedy they are.)
Each of these will negotiate a licensing agreement with the others, for free. But they won't discriminate against anybody else, oh, no!
So why does W3C want to get their hands dirty? Let the big boys go off and negotiate it themselves; that's what they're doing now. This patent-encumbered "standard" will be rather like X was in its early days. And it will fall apart, just like X did when XFree86 started doing the real work, maintenance, and innovation.
If there is a real RAND, free to anyone using the standard (as written, no Microsoft extensions), then the standard has a chance. That's what W3C should drive home before they promulgate a bunch of "open" (aka proprietary) standards.
The non-negotiable condition for inclusion of patented technology should be that the patent be provided on a royalty-free, non-exclusive basis. Any patent not available on such terms should be automatically disqualified.
The message must be clear. Software patents do not serve the public interest. Instead, they constitute at the best roadblocks -- useful ideas off limits to the public, and at the worst, landmines -- when the patent office grants a patent on a widely used technology.
Granted june 2001. They must be joking, or we are looking at another case of "standard group members takes notes on meetings and writes stupid patent that is accepted by the patent office".
I don't care how fair and square they enforce their RAND policy. A high tech company, especially one that has INNOVATE as their slogan, should be ashamed by filing such patents. Shows total lack of quality control.
But not to worry. Fiorentina will run them to the ground with the Compaq merger, so some geek could buy the patents at the firesale, and then we could have a patent BBQ?
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
The easiest thing to do with VoiceXML would be to wait for Microsoft to appropriate it, embrace it, extend it, and make it a free download. They already have pretty decent speech recognition & synthesis (not the best, but servicable) so chances are they will have the majority of the niche users that actually want to talk to their computers.
I'm sure people out there need text to speech technology. I'm sure that VXML would be used by some niche that desperately needs it.
I'm also sure that it'll never take over the internet, because it's a different medium, and has the same drawbacks as other spoken media, both citizen band and broadcast. Audio is linear, the web is random access. If you are interested in a portion of a web page, you will skip to that portion immediately, am I right? Besides, audio is almost as intrusive as Flash and Shockwave, only with VXML, it'll be a patented standard. The last thing I like is web sites with noise on them. If I wanted a multimedia experience, I'd play a good game, not Joe Generic's lame attempt at an interactive web page. I surf for information, not for a memorable experience.
Hmmph. Seems to me W3C should be documenting emerging standards, not creating them.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
It is usually the pr0n business that implements new technology, both on the Internet and home multimedia fronts. While it could be really cool to have those nekkid pictures talking to me, the idea of all of those pop-ups literally screaming out at me a dozen at a time would really freak me out.
At least people are disclosing their patents right now, not after a standard has become de-facto. We don't need more companies like Rambuzz.
There are enough posts already claiming that "my web server should yell for help when it gets slashdotted" that it's pretty obvious no one has read the article yet.
VXML does not make your browser "talk". It is a markup language which allows a client known as a "voice browser" to interpret this markup language and speak to you locally.
obligatory google cache of slasdotted article here.
The issue here isn't that they can't release a new VXML spec. It is that the new spec will logically include ideas that have been patented by other companies.
The big problem is that VXML is currently at 1.0 and companies are pantenting extensions to that spec. Here is a prime example of how rather than getting involved with creating the spec and helping to push out new revisions, the companies start patenting every obvious thing missing from the 1.0 specification. This is obviously going to prevent further revision implementations from emerging from any company that isn't as rich as HP or IBM or MS etc.
As for the usefulness of VXML whoever posted this story missed the boat. VXML isn't used to make your server speak it is used to quickly create a IVR system. This is really a useful ability that few slashdotters have realized.
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
Patents normally take a LONG time to be granted.
When was this applied for? That's what matters.
I had a quick look at it, and it looks pretty nice. The companies give away the software then charge for their central 800 number are interesting. I'd like the option of directly supporting voice modems, but I haven't looked at all the companies yet.
Of course it always comes down to how good the voice command recognition is. I found Microsoft Voice to be a little iffy, and you have to train it. I've got more computer horse power now, so maybe I'll give it a try again. (And most voice modems suck! My USR is 8 kHz. Go with high-end stuff like Dialogic if you can afford it.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Yup, Adcritc has had a number of IBM's excellent Linux commercials for month.
"Where are the flying cars? I thought we are suppost to have flying cars..."
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Patents are death for the little guys, but just poker chips to the big guys.
They can just trade patent licences with each other, and stop any newcomer from upsetting the apple cart.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Software patents do not serve the public interest. Instead, they constitute at the best roadblocks -- useful ideas off limits to the public, and at the worst, landmines
Absolutely.
The best way expose the faults of the software patent system is to expose the damage it does, not just talk about it. Kudos to W3C if they make a policy of "no standard for royalty burdened patents. It may take a few years but eventually the comfortable computer community will notice that the available standards suck and are missing obvious and necessary solutions.
If W3C makes a practice of including patented technology, they become a money-making tool for opportunists and big businesses. You don't think smart execs see the $ in getting their patented stuff in a W3C standard?
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
I looked at this article for two seconds, went to the w3c page, and spent the next five hours fixing my html so it was html 4.01 transitional compliant.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
Sorry, this is completely stupid. Only the US (and a couple of other countries) allow software patents; the other one hundred and twenty-something countries don't. This is just another place where the US needs to step into line with the rest of the world.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I can't seem to find anything already posted, so I am gonna mention it...
Didn't anyone notice that Slashdot was singled out specifically and appealed to for comment. Thats like a huge step, in gaining relavance in the community. Slashdot, is slow becoming a legit political force of sorts.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Not sure whether you were replying to my post as completely stupid or the parent.
To clarify, I agree with _some_ (very few) software patents... ones which are not the slightest bit obvious and cost a lot in development, like some of the stuff in JPEG, MP3, etc.
However, I most definitely do not agree with stealth patenting, such as UNISYS's behaviour over LZW => GIF.
Even so, since software patenting is, unfortunately, rife, I can't really blame companies such as Oracle patenting defensively to protect themselves from outside attack, as opposed to protecting their profits. It'd be nice if they handed over their patents to open groups to hold in trust though. That way, everyone can benefit.
Software patenting is not rife. It isn't even legal in over 98% of the countries in the world. It's vanishingly rare. The main place it is legal is (not coincidentally) the most lawyer-ridden country on the planet.
Frankly the rest of the world does not want the United States exporting it's beurocratic idiocies to us - we have enough of our own. This is your mess. Clean it up.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.