Not only have individual companies created new business units to target new markets for speech technology, Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) has been formed to develop a royalty-free, platform independent standard to enable multimodal and telephony enabled access to information, applications and Web services from many electronic devices, such as PDAs, PCs, telephones etc. SALT has been in existence since October 2001, and will extend existing mark-up languages such as HTML, xHTML and XML. Users of devices will be able to input data to devices via a keyboard, mouse, voice etc.

SALT’s co-founders are Cisco Systems Inc., Comverse Inc., Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., Philips Speech Processing and SpeechWorks International Inc. These enterprises have pledged to encourage the adoption of the resulting SALT technology in a wide range of products. One of the other aims of the forum is to speed up and make it easier to create, deploy and use multimodal and telephony-enabled solutions. The benefits include:

- End users will be able to use SALT-based applications speech, text or graphical interfaces independently or together.

- Developers will be able to embed speech enhancements in existing HTML, xHTML and XML pages, using familiar languages, technologies and toolkits.

- Businesses will be able to offer common Web-based applications across multiple presentation media.

- Service providers will be able to deploy a broad range of applications using standards.

The forum is developing SALT as a platform independent set of solutions, enabling developers to add a speech interface to applications. This enables enterprises to deliver applications from telephones and any other type of GUI-based device. In particular, the ability of service providers to deploy new services and speech applications will be greatly enhanced.

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Voice technology has been expected to enter the mainstream for some time, both in consumer and business applications, however it is only now experiencing the kind of adoption to be described as mainstream. Typical applications include telematics in cars, consumer electronics and telecommunications. Demand is increasing dramatically in the business space where value add is seen to be most important. Delivering speech technology in consumer-based products is seen to deliver functionality and a 'cool' factor rather than delivering much added value at present.

The automotive industry has begun introducing telematics on a large scale, particularly in North America and this trend will be reciprocated in the European markets as manufactures seek to increase margins and differentiate vehicles. The mobile device market is attempting to increase the functionality of devices without having to resort to increasing the screen size, speech technology can help in optimising the size of some devices for applications such as e-mail and simple information retrieval through voice portals. Speech technology can also be used to lock-down devices and be used as a biometric key. This technology is even being used by tagged prisoners that are released into the community. Such schemes are under scrutiny in the UK. The system is being used by the Youth Justice Board and being piloted by the National Probation service. Voice authentication is used to curb offending patterns by keeping offenders at home, helping to promote education, training, and work by ensuring the person is at a specified place at a specified time.

Despite the obvious impact on improving the functionality of devices with speech-to-text facilities, verification processes and simple controls there are major benefits to be had at the back-end for enterprises with large numbers of customers. Customer service enhancement can be aided with the addition of speech technology and it has been used to voice enable many applications. Speech technology has been used in many areas of customer service such as billing, ticket ordering, appointment scheduling etc. however the end-user experience has generally been poor. Improvements in speech technology means that it more readily lends itself to customer service applications, enterprises are able to speed up response times and unify web and phone customer service through speech to text and vice versa. For example, a train ticketing agency could provide booking services over the phone or the Internet - yet utilise the same back-end system without relying on too many customer service operators, operators would only intervene if a problem was flagged-up.

We have only seen the beginning of the speech technology revolution, it is expected to bring new functionality and flexibility at the user interface and improve customer service. Speech technology will not dramatically change our lives, but it will give us choice and flexibility.

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