The VoiceXML Forum Announces a Competitive Grant Program Championing New Technology or Standards in the Area of Voice Technology

The VoiceXML Forum will issue (2) grants, each grant will be in the amount of $25,000 to an individual, or group of individuals affiliated with a not for profit institution for an initiative or alliance championing new technology or standards in the area of Voice Technology that continues to display the spirit of The VoiceXML Forum’s original mission.

The VoiceXML Forum is a global industry organization that works to accelerate the adoption of VoiceXML and adjacent technologies. As the world’s leading VoiceXML advocate, the VoiceXML Forum’s members work together to:

  • Certify the conformance of The VoiceXML Forum’s platforms to the The VoiceXML Forum standard, helping to ensure the interoperability of VoiceXML tools, and applications.
  • Collaborate with standards organizations and other industry consortia, such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the IETF.
  • Create Publications, including requirements, best practices, and use case for voice user interface design, application architecture, and application development.
  • Identify, document, and publish use cases and requirements for a broad range of VoiceXML applications, including multimodal applications and applications that leverage Speech Technology, for instance Internet of Things (IoT).

Tools

  • Tools for low level of control of phonetic pronunciation for ASR and TTS engines
  • Tools for conducting fields trials for NLP
  • Tools for expanding use of emotions in speech and multimodal applications
  • Vendor-agnostic tools for developing virtual assistant applications.

Applications

  • Application(s) for Speech or multimodal that will benefit society
  • Application(s) to assist students or individuals with disabilities for remote learning,
    and to ease integration with society
  • Basic social skills interaction training for people of different cultures in a new-to-them culture
    Methodology
  • Automated response generation for speech and multimodal applications
  • Mechanism for learning from past conversations for designing dialogue strategies

Infrastructure

  • Annotated open source NLP corpus covering advanced natural language utterances. (for example, multi-intent, negation, quantifiers, anaphora).

To Be Eligible

  • Applicants must be affiliated with a host not-for-profit institution.
  • Only not-for-profit organizations are eligible to receive grants, not individuals or commercial enterprises.
  • There are no geographic limitations on applicants.
  • Applicants must have earned a doctorate or other advanced degree, or appropriate experience in technology endeavors.

Timeline

  • Request for Proposal release date: October 26, 2020
  • Proposal Deadline: December 31, 2020
  • Review of Full proposal by Expert Review Panel: January 1 – January 15, 2021
  • Anticipated Grant Proposal notification date: January 22, 2021
  • Agreement for Grant recipient expected to be executed by: February 15, 2021.

Application Requirements

  • Complete all requirements of online application. The required documents are listed below:
  • Cover Letter Document
  • Full Proposal Document
  • Detailed budget
  • Vita(s) and (if needed) Supporting Vita(s)

Review of Proposal and Grant Approval

  • Grant proposals received in response to the Request for Proposal are reviewed by an Expert Review Panel to make final decisions.
  • The panel is comprised of professionals with advanced degrees and/or expertise in Speech Technology.

Notification to Applicant(s)

  • All applicants, both successful and unsuccessful, will be notified via email by the above-mentioned date.
  • Applicants may be asked for additional clarification during the review period.

If you encounter technical issues with website please contact katherine.valenti@ieee-isto.org

If you have questions regarding this Request for Proposal please direct them to katherine.valenti@ieee-isto.org

Documents

Grant Checklist (PDF)

This document lists all the required documents needed for submission.

Cover Letter (PDF)

This is a required writable PDF document which lists all applicant contact information and the high level proposal description.

Proposal Document (PDF)

This is a required writable PDF document that describes your proposal in detail. This document includes the goals and objectives, assessment of need of the project, target audience, design and methods, innovation description, evaluation and outcome plans, anticipated project timeline and references.

Vita Document

It is required that your proposal also include vitas for all applicants as well as any host vitas if required.

Budget Document (XLS)

This is a high level budget plan document. It is also required that you attach a more detailed budget in whatever format you choose if available.

Submitting Instructions

The grant program for Voice XML has sunset and is not taking on any additional projects at this time.