VoiceXML Forum Grant Program

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.

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