Two Technologies Vie for Recognition in Speech Market

I mprovements to voice-recognition algorithms and greater computing power have changed speech technology from an approach with limited uses to an increasingly important part of many applications. As this process has unfolded, developers have searched for an open standard , rather than proprietary development and runtime environments, that would let them easily and quickly add speech input/output capabilities to applications that function across platforms , said Inderpal Singh Mumick, founder and CEO of Kirusa, a wireless-platform developer. Two principal approaches have resulted from this search: VoiceXML and SALT (speech application language tags). Each approach's goal is to let users with minimal training add speech interfaces to applications. Both utilize speech-recognition and speech-synthesis systems to convert voice input to a format that a computer system can understand, to retrieve or produce the requested information, and to convert it back into speech for the user. VoiceXML is a completely self-contained language for writing speech-based user interfaces. SALT, a newer technology, is a collection of XML tags that developers can embed into an application written in other languages to create a speech or multimodal user interface. Multimodal interfaces can be controlled by voice and traditional input methods such as a keyboard or mouse. Both technologies let developers design speech applications that are portable across multiple platforms. " VoiceXML and SALT tags hide many of the low-level details often present in proprietary languages, " said Jim Larson, principal of Larson Technology Services and chair of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) Voice Browser Working Group. " This decreases the time required to write and debug code. And because standard languages are more widely used, there will be more developers trained in using them. " The speech technologies would be particularly useful for mobile applications because many handheld devices have tiny keyboards and screens, as well as other limitations that make traditional I/O approaches difficult, noted Rob Kassel, a product manager for SpeechWorks International and a representative of the SALT Forum, an industry consortium that promotes SALT use for multimodal and tele-phony applications. The stakes are huge. Allied Business Intelligence, an industry research firm, projects the global speech-technology market will increase from $677 million in 2002 to $897.8 million this year and to $5.3 billion by 2008, as Figure 1 shows. A number of forces are driving demand for speech technologies and, therefore, VoiceXML and SALT. Text-to-speech applications let users convert text-based data to speech, …