The Speech Application Language Tags Forum (SALT) has officially
submitted Version 1.0 of its specification for consideration by two
committees of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The specification was submitted to the Multimodal Working Group and
the Voice Browser Working Group of the W3C. The SALT Forum includes
many high-tech industry companies, including founding members Cisco
Systems, Comverse Technology, Intel, Microsoft, Philips and
SpeechWorks International.
There has been some controversy surrounding multimodal
specifications, there being proponents of the SALT Forum's
technology as well as proponents of another multimodal technology
submitted to the W3C by the Voice XML Forum. Each group claims to
have the better development environment for creating a user
interface on mobile devices that would combine voice, touch-screen,
and graphical systems to access data.
The Voice XML Forum, which includes founding members AT&T, IBM,
Lucent Technologies and Motorola was set up in 1999. Earlier this
year its specification, which did not include multimodal
development, was approved as a standard markup language for
creating voice responses to make menu selections in lieu of making
choices by depressing a series of numbers on a keypad.
The submission of the SALT Forum specification to the same
standards body that is currently reviewing the Voice XML proposal
should help to break the deadlock between the two competing
standards according to one industry analyst.
"The main thing is W3C will consider not only SALT but the
specification by [Voice XML Forum] to break up the pieces of VXML
and consider that," said Bill Meisel president of TMA Associates, a
speech technology research firm in California, USA.
Some of the controversy might have been avoided if, when the SALT
Forum originally submitted the specification to the W3C, it had
been able to announce that it had done so. However, W3C guidelines
state that a submitting organisation cannot identify the W3C until
it officially acknowledges that it is considering a submission,
according to Rob Kassel, a member of SALT and product manager for
Emerging Technology at SpeechWorks.
The fact that the specification has been submitted to a standards
body at all is also verification of the claim by the SALT Forum
that there was no single company agenda here and it would be an
open standard, Meisel added.
"If they had found a separate standards body, not as involved with
XML, it would be seen as more competitive. But this is clearly an
attempt to make a standard everybody can live with," Meisel said.