The World Wide Web Consortium last week announced new work on extensions to components of the Speech Interface Framework that will extend Speech Synthesis Markup Language to support Asian languages, among others, and extend speaker verification features into the next version of VoiceXML, Version 3.0.

Based in part on its first technical Workshop in Beijing and input from the VoiceXML Forum, the W3C is building on the Speech Interface Framework, the organization said.

SSML is designed to provide an XML-based markup language for creating synthetic speech in Web and other applications, W3C officials said.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.