SpeechWorks, Microsoft join forces

Microsoft and SpeechWorks entered into a strategic relationship Monday for delivering development tools for creating speech-enabled Web services. The technologies will be based on the Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) specification, which supports text-to-speech and related functions for multiple devices, such as telephones, wireless handhelds or cellular phones.

SALT, which is compatible with Web-based languages HTML, XHTML and XML, is advocated by the SALT Forum, formed in October by Cisco Systems, Intel, Microsoft, Philips and Boston-based SpeechWorks. The SALT strategy in many ways competes with speech services from IBM, the de facto voice recognition leader, following the collapse of Lernout & Hauspie.