Why do people in the speech community need to know about PLS?
Baggia: PLS can improve speech recognition and text-to-speech, especially when acronyms or difficult-to-pronounce words, such as proper names and locations that often are pronounced in unpredictable ways, are used. Dahl: How will PLS make the development of voice applications easier? Baggia: The PLS 1.0 specification defines the format of an XML document used to store pronunciation transcriptions. Then the PLS document can be included both in a grammar and prompt to customize the pronunciations when needed. Dahl: Can PLS make internationalization/localization easier? Baggia: I see many benefits that PLS can bring to internationalization/localization tasks. First, PLS resources might be available to simplify customization in a new language, especially because PLS is standard. Second, PLS can factor out the customization in a single document to be applied across different applications. Finally, PLS documents can be transparently used both in speech recognition and TTS without implementin
