Voice and data convergence took a step forward last week when
industry heavyweights got together to form a standard for adding
speech input and output to Web applications.
Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Comverse and Philips are among the
inaugural members of the Speech Application Language Tags (Salt)
Forum. Their aim is to develop cross-platform multimodal access to
Web pages and applications using royalty-free extensions to mark-up
languages such as HTML, XHTML and XML with the aid of lightweight
Salt tags.
This will mean that current applications will not have to be
rewritten to allow users to interact with their computers
multimodally - using speech or input devices, such as keyboard,
mouse and stylus - to suit their circumstances.
Alistair Woodman, director of marketing for Cisco's Voice
Technology Centre, explained, "The ability to add speech to
graphical applications will contribute to further growth in the
rapidly expanding VoIP [Voice Over IP] market and will enable
delivery of innovative and interoperable value-added communications
and services over a single packet network."
Microsoft will offer Web developer tools to implement Salt,
including providing Salt extensions for Visual Studio.net, ASP.net,
Internet Explorer and Pocket Internet Explorer, said Kai Fu-Li,
vice-president of Microsoft's Natural Interactive Services
Division.
The Salt Forum hopes to make the standard specification available
in the first quarter of 2002 and submit it to a standards body by
the middle of the year.