Like most technical specialties, the speech applications industry has a large number of official standards. Fortunately, many of these standards are widely implemented. The implementations aren’t perfectly consistent, of course, but they’re close enough that at Voxify we’ve been able to get our speech applications platform to run on different VoiceXML browsers and ASR and TTS engines with relative ease.
Deborah Dahl recently wrote an article on speech standards and specifications for Speech Technology magazine that does an excellent job of organizing and describing the relevant standards. Deborah has been very active in the speech industry, especially in the multimodal interaction area. She’s currently the chair of the W3C’s Multimodal Interaction Working Group, in which my friend and former colleague, Wu Chou, is a key participant.