SALT support trumps Voice XML as Speech Server sounds return of enterprise voice

Microsoft has welcomed a new addition to its server family: the Speech Server. Running on Windows Server 2003, the first public beta of Speech Server will ship with Beta 3 of Microsoft’s Speech Application SDK (Software Development Kit) in what signals speech technology’s return to the corporate agenda. Due for manufacturing release before mid-2004, the product will include a text-to-speech engine from SpeechWorks — Microsoft’s own speech-recognition engine — and a telephony interface manager. The offering will also include middleware that is being designed in partnership with Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel and Dallas-based Intervoice to connect the Microsoft product to an enterprise telephony infrastructure. But it is the server’s SALT (Speech Application Language Tags) voice browser that sets Microsoft apart from the standards crowd. Rather than adhering to VXML (Voice XML) — the current W3C standard for developing speech-based telephony applications — Speech Server is compatible only with applications that use the specifications developed by the SALT Forum, of which Microsoft is a founding member. The SALT Forum has submitted its specifications to a W3C working group, but they are far from becoming a standard. The SALT specification was originally targeted at the multimodal market for browsing the Web on handheld devices. The theory was that users required multiple ways to interface with smaller devices and that voice would be chief among them, but the market for multimodal handhelds has not materialized.