Archive for November, 2009

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This week the W3C holds its annual Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee meeting (TPAC 2009). There will be about a dozen people from the IE team participating and this is a valuable opportunity to continue working together with other W3C members on the next generation of web standards. High quality specifications that improve interoperability between browsers are important. Our goal is to help ensure these new standards work well for web developers and will work well in future versions of IE.

We will participate in a number of browser related working group meetings including accessibility, CSS and HTML sessions. For many groups, this is the only face to face time participants will get and so this is a perfect time to put faces to email addresses. Held in Santa Clara, California this year, the close proximity to many of the companies involved in the W3C means a large number of attendees is expected.

Over the last few months, some of us in the IE team have been working through the HTML5 working draft reviewing the specification text. It is interesting to exchange ideas and help the specification become clearer and I am looking forward to seeing many of the people involved again. There has been a long discussion about the submission we made to the HTML working group about distributed extensibility. Tony Ross, the author of our discussion document, will be participating in a panel on extensibility with Jonas Sicking from Mozilla on Wednesday.

Eliot Graff, a lead technical editor for IE, who is helping edit an updated draft of the Canvas API document that Doug Schepers started will also be at the HTML working group meeting this week.

Kris Krueger, one of our lead test managers, has volunteered to help the newly formed Testing Task Force within the HTML working group. Having a comprehensive test suite that thoroughly tests a specification is a key step to ensuring implementations interoperate successfully. Kris will be taking part in the HTML working group meeting on Thursday and Friday.

Paul Cotton, who was recently appointed as a co-chair of the HTML working group as Chris Wilson changed his focus to programmability in the web platform, will also be with us at the TPAC to help the overall work.

On Thursday, the W3C has organised a Developer Gathering for web and application developers who don’t normally participate in the W3C to join discussions about web standards. In my experience the participation of web developers is extremely important to check the overall ease of use of the specifications and APIs being proposed as standards.  One of our program managers, Sylvain Galineau, will be amongst the CSS Strike Force presenting CSS demos.

I don’t have room in this short blog post to mention everyone who will be involved this week but I’ve tried to give a flavour for the work that we will be participating in. Above all, it’s fun to hang out with people you mostly see only by email so there will be lots of hallway conversations and debates over lunch or dinner. I can’t wait.

Adrian Bateman
Program Manager

Posted by Pedro J. Moreno, Research Scientist

Google Search by Voice was released more than one year ago as a feature of Google Mobile App, our downloadable application for smartphones. Its performance has been improving consistently and it now understands not only US English, but also UK, Australian, and Indian-English accents. However, this is far from Google's goal to find information and make it easily accessible in any language.

So, almost one year ago a team of researchers and engineers at Google's offices in Bangalore, Beijing, Mountain View, and New York decided we had to fix this problem. Our next question was, which should be our first language to address beyond English? We could have chosen many languages. The decision wasn't easy, but once we looked carefully at demographics and internet populations the choice was clear--we decided to work on Mandarin.

Mandarin is a fascinating language. Over this year we have learned about the differences between traditional and simplified Chinese, tonal characteristics in Chinese, pinyin representations of Chinese characters, sandhi rules, the different accents and languages in China, unicode representations of Chinese character sets...the list goes on and on. It has been a fascinating journey. The conclusion of all this work is today's launch of Mandarin Voice Search, as a part of Google Mobile App for Nokia s60 phones. Google Mobile App places a Google search widget on your Nokia phone's home screen, allowing you to quickly search by voice or by typing.



This is a first version of Mandarin search by voice and it is rough around the edges. It might not work very well if you have a strong southern Chinese accent for example, but we will continue working to improve it. The more you use it, the more it will improve, so please use it and send us your comments. And stay tuned for more languages. We know a lot of people speak neither English nor Mandarin!

To try Mandarin search by voice, download the new version of Google Mobile App on your Nokia S60 phone by visiting m.google.com from your phone's browser.