Will Speech Syntax Markup Language (SSML) Become the New HTML?

8 points·ExactoKnight··6 comments

Was playing around with Amazon Echo and was struck by Amazon's documentation for Speech Synthesis Markup Language.

As I read these incredibly clear API docs for creating and contextualizing how to read out nuanced pronunciation... I have become convinced that syntax like this is the future. https://developer.amazon.com/docs/custom-skills/speech-synthesis-markup-language-ssml-reference.html

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It's Speech Synthesis Markup Language, and, no, it won't be the next HTML; it's got a narrower niche, and most of the semantic and presentational support it provides for rendering speech is already provided between HTML and the CSS Speech Module.

SSML and related technologies (VoiceXML, for instance) are great for dedicated speech applications, but they aren't positioned to replace HTML.

Is it really that different from, say, VoiceXML, which has been around since the 90's?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoiceXML

VoiceXML uses SSML to mark up text to be spoken to the user, and in fact the two standards were developed in parallel by the W3C’s Voice Browser Working Group.

Hopefully, with an AWS offering, this could give an impetus to widespread adoption. A lot of great ideas are simply left dormant because of network effects.

SSML is fairly widely supported now in it's domain (and, unless I'm mistaken, the generally similar features in CSS Speech were modelled on it.)

So, an XML-like language is the future of XML-like HTML?

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