Intel and Microsoft add a pinch of Salt to speech apps

By Alun Williams

Posted on 15 Oct 2002 at 11:32

Industry giants collaborate on Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) for talking over the Web.

The initiative will involve reference designs for both software and hardware speech technologies.

The idea is to enable businesses, such as ISVs (independent software vendors) and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), to more easily build and deploy telephony and speech application systems.

The scope of the work will encompass both the Microsoft .Net Speech platform and Intel's communications technology, such as Intel Architecture servers, Intel NetStructure communications boards and Intel telephony call management interface software.

'Microsoft and Intel have a common desire to make development and implementation of speech systems faster, easier and more economical for enterprise customers,' said Kai-Fu Lee, VP of the Natural Interactive Services Division at Microsoft. 'The combined expertise and experience of Microsoft and Intel in the development of speech hardware and software will help companies take advantage of leading-edge speech technologies to provide rich, value-added services and an enhanced customer experience simply by extending their existing Web-based infrastructure and business applications.'

'The use of standards-based Intel and Microsoft technologies in the reference design brings the element of modularity to the solution, and provides higher performance, lower development costs and quicker time to market for resulting product,' said Howard Bubb, general manager of Intel's Network Processing Group.

The development agreement was announced yesterday, at the Intel Communications Summit 2002 in Orlando, Florida.

The SALT specification - a set of speech-related extensions to commonly-used Web-based programming languages - was submitted to the W3C in August.