MRCP

The Media Resource Control Protocol Version 2 (MRCPv2) allows client hosts to control media service resources such as speech synthesizers, recognizers, verifiers, and identifiers residing in servers on the network. MRCPv2 is not a "stand-alone" protocol -- it relies on other protocols, such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), to coordinate MRCPv2 clients and servers and manage sessions between them, and the Session Description Protocol (SDP) to describe, discover, and exchange capabilities. It also depends on SIP and SDP to establish the media sessions and associated parameters between the media source or sink and the media server. Once this is done, the MRCPv2 exchange operates over the control session established above, allowing the client to control the media processing resources on the speech resource server. [STANDARDS-TRACK]

This document describes a Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP) that was developed jointly by Cisco Systems, Inc., Nuance Communications, and Speechworks, Inc. It is published as an RFC as input for further IETF development in this area.

MRCP controls media service resources like speech synthesizers, recognizers, signal generators, signal detectors, fax servers, etc., over a network. This protocol is designed to work with streaming protocols like RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) or SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), which help establish control connections to external media streaming devices, and media delivery mechanisms like RTP (Real Time Protocol). This memo provides information for the Internet community.

This document outlines the needs and requirements for a protocol to control distributed speech processing of audio streams. By speech processing, this document specifically means automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker recognition -- which includes both speaker identification (SI) and speaker verification (SV) -- and text-to-speech (TTS). Other IETF protocols, such as SIP and Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), address rendezvous and control for generalized media streams. However, speech processing presents additional requirements that none of the extant IETF protocols address. This memo provides information for the Internet community.