Are there particular languages for which PLS is especially useful?
Baggia: Yes, there are. For instance, languages like English might benefit from PLS more so than languages like Italian or Spanish. This is because English has so many irregular pronunciations. Also, English is always borrowing words or creating new words. In Italian, on the other hand, the rules for pronunciations are much easier and it is an exception to find words that you don’t know how to pronounce. Dahl: How can a PLS lexicon be used with ASR/TTS/VoiceXML software? Baggia: PLS documents are loaded in Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) grammars and Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) prompts by means of the lexicon element that is defined in both specifications. Dahl: Who can create a PLS lexicon? Baggia: To create a PLS document/lexicon is very easy. The language includes only six elements and a few more attributes. It is a simple language to use, and it’s very easy to expand an acronym into the words to be pronounced. For instance, U.S. can be spoken as is or re
