The W3C Voice Browser Working Group has posted the Candidate Recommendation of the Speech Synthesis Markup Language Version 1.0. According to the abstract, the Speech Synthesis Markup Language "is designed to provide a rich, XML-based markup language for assisting the generation of synthetic speech in Web and other applications. The essential role of the markup language is to provide authors of synthesizable content a standard way to control aspects of speech such as pronunciation, volume, pitch, rate, etc. across different synthesis-capable platforms."
The Voice Browser Working Group has also published the proposed recommendation of the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification Version 1.0. "This document defines syntax for representing grammars for use in speech recognition so that developers can specify the words and patterns of words to be listened for by a speech recognizer. The syntax of the grammar format is presented in two forms, an Augmented BNF Form and an XML Form. The specification makes the two representations mappable to allow automatic transformations between the two forms."