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Introduction to SALT: unleashing the potential. (SALT).

Article Excerpt
Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) is a set of XML-based tags that can be added to existing Web-based applications, enhancing the user interface through interactive speech recognition. In addition, SALT can be used to extend Web-based applications to the telephony world, thereby providing an opportunity to unleash the potential of a huge user community, users of normal touch-tone telephones.

SALTforum, an organization founded by Microsoft, Cisco, SpeechWorks, Philips, Comverse, and Intel, has spearheaded development of the SALT specification, now in its 1.0 release.

Multimodality: Beyond Standalone Web and Speech Applications

On one hand, we have the ubiquitous World Wide Web, which provides the core standards-based networking infrastructure and connects a large number of users to consumer and business applications. On the other hand, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and touch-tone systems-based telephony applications have also been around for some time, providing basic connectivity (typically using the touch-tone and pre-recorded speech interfaces) to telephony users. In both scenarios what we're really using is a single modality. In the case of interactive speech recognition applications, it is touch-tone or speech input and speech output, while in the Web application scenario, we're using a basic graphical user interface as the application modality.

Multimodality means that we can utilize more than one mode of user interface with the application, something like our normal human communications with each other. For instance, consider an application that allows us to get driving directions--while it's typically easier to speak the start and destination addresses (or even better, shortcuts like "my home," "my office," "my doctor's office," based on my previously established profile), the turn-by-turn and overall directions are typically best viewed through a map and turn-by-turn directions as well, something similar to what we're used to seeing on MapQuest. In essence, a multimodal application, when...

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