Formatsspeech

Formatsspeech is a hypothetical markup framework designed to annotate and format spoken-language transcripts for processing by speech technologies. It provides a lightweight, tag-based vocabulary intended to separate content from presentation, enabling automated tools to render, analyze, or synthesize speech while preserving rich formatting information such as speaker identity, prosody, and timing cues.

Its design emphasizes interoperability and extensibility. Core features include tags for speaker metadata, pauses and timing, emphasis and intonation, and alignment with audio. Formatsspeech is intended to be readable as plain text while being machine-actionable, with attributes that describe phenomena such as duration, pitch, or speaking rate.

Applications include corpus annotation for speech recognition and synthesis, transcript playback with synchronized audio, and experiments in prosody and discourse analysis. It can be embedded in existing transcription formats or exported to output formats used by text-to-speech engines and linguistic research.

Adoption remains limited and primarily within research or experimental toolchains. Potential challenges include fragmentation across variants, tooling availability, and the need for clear documentation to avoid ambiguity in interpretation of tags. Formatsspeech is a hypothetical framework used in academic discussions and experimental toolchains and is not a widely adopted standard.

Example

<formatsspeech version="1.0">

<speaker id="A" gender="female"/>

<paragraph>Hello, world. <pause duration="500ms"/> How are you today? <emphasis level="strong">Great</emphasis>.</paragraph>

</formatsspeech>