Subject: WG Review: Speech Services Control (speechsc)

From: Steve Coya <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2002 08:46:00 -0400

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Transport Area.
The IESG has not made any determination as yet. 

The following Description was submitted, and is provided for
informational purposes only:

Speech Services Control (speechsc)
----------------------------------

 Current Status: Proposed Working Group

Description of Working Group:

Many multimedia applications can benefit from having Automated Speech
Recognition (ASR), Text to Speech (TTS), and Speaker Verification (SV)
processing available as a distributed, network resource. To date, there 
are a number of proprietary ASR, TTS, and SV API's, as well as two IETF 
drafts, that address this problem. However, there are serious 
deficiencies to the existing drafts relating to this problem. In 
particular, they mix the semantics of existing protocols yet are close 
enough to other protocols as to be confusing to the implementer.

The speechsc Work Group will develop protocols to support distributed 
media processing of audio streams. The focus of this working group is
to develop protocols to support ASR, TTS, and SV. The working group
will only focus on the secure distributed control of these servers.

The working group will develop an informational RFC detailing the
architecture and requirements for distributed speechsc control. In 
addition, the requirements document will describe the use cases driving 
these requirements. The working group will then examine existing 
media-related protocols, especially RTSP, for suitability as a protocol 
for carriage of speechsc server control. The working group will then 
propose extensions to existing protocols or the development of new 
protocols, as appropriate, to meet the requirements specified in the 
informational RFC.

The protocol will assume RTP carriage of media. Assuming 
session-oriented media transport, the protocol will use SDP to describe 
the session.

The working group will not be investigating distributed speech 
recognition (DSR), as exemplified by the ETSI Aurora project. The 
working group will not be recreating functionality available in other 
protocols, such as SIP or SDP. The working group will offer changes to 
existing protocols, with the possible exception of RTSP, to the 
appropriate IETF work group for consideration. This working group will 
explore modifications to RTSP, if required.

It is expected that we will coordinate our work in the IETF with the
W3C Mutlimodal Interaction Work Group; the ITU-T Study Group 16 Working 
Party 3/16 on SG 16 Question 15/16; the 3GPP TSG SA WG1; and the ETSI 
Aurora STQ.

Once the current set of milestones is completed, the speechsc charter 
may be expanded, with IESG approval, to cover additional uses of the 
technology, such as the orchestration of multiple ASR/TTS/SV servers, 
the accommodation of additional types of servers such as simultaneous 
translation servers, etc.