A group of technology leaders are collaborating to develop a new Web language that will let users input and access data on various wireless devices via speech. Cisco Systems, Comverse, Intel, Microsoft, Philips Speech Processing, and SpeechWorks International are co-founding the Speech Application Language Tags or Salt Forum.

Salt intends to extend the capabilities of HTML, xHTML, and eventually XML. Doing so will allow users to combine speech with audio and visual input and output on wireless devices, says Steve Chambers, a VP at Speechworks International. By using Salt, the forum leaders claim, developers will be able to embed speech tags into existing HTML, xHTML, and XML pages, without having to rewrite applications. Businesses will be able to use their existing Web investments and expertise, and they won't need to create discrete speech applications.

The forum founders expect to make the specification publicly available in March or April of 2002. They say they'll submit it to a standards body, such as the World Wide Web Consortium or the Internet Engineering Task Force, by midyear.

Microsoft, one of the Salt Forum's leaders, is poised to enter the speech technology arena with the release of XP and talk about integration of telephony with desktops, says Meta analyst Earl Perkins. "This Salt initiative could be a part of the evolution in the industry to establish voice middleware and architecture to support voice as an additional point of interaction," says Perkins. That's something longtime voiceXML proponent IBM would welcome. "IBM is frustrated because it can't get the industry to realize that voiceXML goes beyond integrating speech with the Internet," Perkins says. IBM is not included among the founding members of Salt.