This week the IETF issued the “Last Call” for comments on version 2 of the Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP), a.k.a. “MRCPv2″. Voxeo’s Dan Burnett is the editor for the specification and this week released the 24th (and hopefully final) revision of the document:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-speechsc-mrcpv2

I’ve written about MCRP before, in November 2008 and then in September 2009, but if you aren’t familiar with MRCP, it is a protocol that allows platforms such as our Prophecy platform to easily interact with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) or Text-To-Speech (TTS) engines. You can think of it like this:

MRCP-simple.jpg

MRCP is an open standard that enables your application platform to connect to any “MRCP-compliant” speech engine. This can allow you to connect to speech engines that, for instance, support a language that is not one that we commonly make available. Or you might have a very specialized speech engine for a specific use case. I recall one customer who was looking to do speech recognition in a very noisy environment and wanted to use a very specialized speech engine that they had access to. Because that speech engine was MRCP-compliant our platform could connect to it. That’s the kind of interop that MCRP can enable.

As the IETF Last Call announcement indicates, the IESG is asking for comments by April 13, 2011. After this Last Call process, the IESG will make a decision that will hopefully lead to MRCPv2 being published as an RFC. (If not, there could be another review process.)

Originally from Voxeo Blogs