The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the meaning and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web. As of 5 March 2023, W3C had 462 members. W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web.
Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows telephone users to interact with a computer-operated telephone system through the use of voice and DTMF tones input with a keypad. In telecommunications, IVR allows customers to interact with a company's host system via a telephone keypad or by speech recognition, after which services can be inquired about through the IVR dialogue. IVR systems can respond with pre-recorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct users on how to proceed. IVR systems deployed in the network are sized to handle large call volumes and also used for outbound calling as IVR systems are more intelligent than many predictive dialer systems.
VoiceXML (VXML) is a digital document standard for specifying interactive media and voice dialogs between humans and computers. It is used for developing audio and voice response applications, such as banking systems and automated customer service portals. VoiceXML applications are developed and deployed in a manner analogous to how a web browser interprets and visually renders the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) it receives from a web server. VoiceXML documents are interpreted by a voice browser and in common deployment architectures, users interact with voice browsers via the public switched telephone network (PSTN).
X3D is a set of royalty-free ISO/IEC standards for declaratively representing 3D computer graphics. X3D includes multiple graphics file formats, programming-language API definitions, and run-time specifications for both delivery and integration of interactive network-capable 3D data. X3D version 4.0 has been approved by Web3D Consortium, and is under final review by ISO/IEC as a revised International Standard (IS).
Call Control eXtensible Markup Language (CCXML) is an XML standard designed to provide asynchronous event-based telephony support to VoiceXML. Its current status is a W3C recommendation, adopted May 10, 2011. Whereas VoiceXML is designed to provide a Voice User Interface to a voice browser, CCXML is designed to inform the voice browser how to handle the telephony control of the voice channel. The two XML applications are wholly separate and are not required by each other to be implemented - however, they have been designed with interoperability in mind
A user interface markup language is a markup language that renders and describes graphical user interfaces and controls. Many of these markup languages are dialects of XML and are dependent upon a pre-existing scripting language engine, usually a JavaScript engine, for rendering of controls and extra scriptability.
Multimodal interaction provides the user with multiple modes of interacting with a system. A multimodal interface provides several distinct tools for input and output of data.
Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) is a W3C standard for how speech recognition grammars are specified. A speech recognition grammar is a set of word patterns, and tells a speech recognition system what to expect a human to say. For instance, if you call an auto-attendant application, it will prompt you for the name of a person. It will then start up a speech recognizer, giving it a speech recognition grammar. This grammar contains the names of the people in the auto attendant's directory and a collection of sentence patterns that are the typical responses from callers to the prompt.
Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) is an XML-based markup language for speech synthesis applications. It is a recommendation of the W3C's Voice Browser Working Group. SSML is often embedded in VoiceXML scripts to drive interactive telephony systems. However, it also may be used alone, such as for creating audio books. For desktop applications, other markup languages are popular, including Apple's embedded speech commands, and Microsoft's SAPI Text to speech (TTS) markup, also an XML language. It is also used to produce sounds via Azure Cognitive Services' Text to Speech API or when writing third-party skills for Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa.
Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) is an XML-based markup language that is used in HTML and XHTML pages to add voice recognition capabilities to web-based applications.
The Speech Application Programming Interface or SAPI is an API developed by Microsoft to allow the use of speech recognition and speech synthesis within Windows applications. To date, a number of versions of the API have been released, which have shipped either as part of a Speech SDK or as part of the Windows OS itself. Applications that use SAPI include Microsoft Office, Microsoft Agent and Microsoft Speech Server.
SCXML stands for State Chart XML: State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction. It is an XML-based markup language that provides a generic state-machine-based execution environment based on Harel statecharts.
The Multimodal Interaction Activity is an initiative from W3C aiming to provide means to support Multimodal interaction scenarios on the Web.
XHTML+Voice is an XML language for describing multimodal user interfaces. The two essential modalities are visual and auditory. Visual interaction is defined like most current web pages via XHTML. Auditory components are defined by a subset of Voice XML. Interfacing the voice and visual components of X+V documents is accomplished through a combination of ECMAScript, JavaScript, and XML Events.
An Emotion Markup Language has first been defined by the W3C Emotion Incubator Group (EmoXG) as a general-purpose emotion annotation and representation language, which should be usable in a large variety of technological contexts where emotions need to be represented. Emotion-oriented computing is gaining importance as interactive technological systems become more sophisticated. Representing the emotional states of a user or the emotional states to be simulated by a user interface requires a suitable representation format; in this case a markup language is used.
A SpeechWeb is a collection of hyperlinked speech applications, accessed remotely by speech browsers running on end-user devices. Links are activated through spoken commands.
Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is part of the family of XML markup languages. It mirrors or extends versions of the widely used HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the language in which Web pages are formulated.
Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces is an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium since 2005. It was published as a Recommendation of the W3C on October 25, 2012. The document is a technical report specifying a multimodal system architecture and its generic interfaces to facilitate integration and multimodal interaction management in a computer system. It has been developed by the W3C's Multimodal Interaction Working Group.