The SALT Forum, a group of companies with a shared goal of accelerating the use of speech technologies in multimodal and telephony systems, has announced the availability of Version 1.0 of the Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) specification. This provides the first complete definition of the SALT specification suitable for deployment of multimodal and telephony applications.
The SALT specification defines a set of lightweight tags as extensions to commonly used Web-based programming languages, strengthened by incorporating existing standards from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This allows developers to add speech interfaces to Web content and applications using familiar tools and techniques. In multimodal applications, the tags can be added to support speech input and output either as standalone events or jointly with other interface options such as speaking while pointing to the screen with a stylus. In telephony applications, the tags provide a programming interface to manage the speech recognition and text-to-speech resources needed to conduct interactive dialogs with the caller through a speech-only interface.
The SALT specification is designed to work equally well on traditional computers, handheld devices such as PDAs, home electronics such as video recorders, telematics devices such as in-car navigation systems, and communications devices such as mobile phones.
Version 1.0 of the SALT specification covers three broad areas of capabilities: speech output, speech input and call control. The specification's "prompt" tag allows SALT-based applications to play audio and synthetic speech directly, while "listen" and "bind" tags provide speech recognition capabilities by collecting and processing spoken user input. In addition, the specification's call control object can be used to provide SALT-based applications with the ability to place, answer, transfer and disconnect calls, along with advanced capabilities such as conferencing.
The SALT specification draws on emerging W3C standards such as Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) and semantic interpretation for speech recognition to provide additional application control.
The SALT specification is now being submitted to an established international standards body to provide the basis of an open, royalty-free standard for speech-enabling multimodal and telephony applications.
Version 1.0 is published on the SALT Forum website saltform.org
