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Voice
Web Solutions Releases SALT Development Tool for Creating
Voice-Enabled Web Content.
Joins Speech Industry Leaders as Member of the SALT Forum.
Seattle, Washington –
March 17, 2003 – Voice Web Solutions, Inc., a developer
of tools for speech technology companies, announced today
that they have joined the SALT Forum and released a SALT developer
tool called Voice Web Studio™.
The
Voice Web Studio product is an extension to Macromedia Dreamweaver
MX™ that phenomenally enhances how developers create
voice-enabled Web content. Voice Web Studio is the first tool
that enables average Web developers to use any scripting language
to extend the reach of existing Web sites to any telephony
system, wireless device or handheld while using the same Web
authoring environment. Voice is the next logical step for
the evolution of the Web and the accessibility of content
to a broader audience. Developers can create speech interfaces
that mimic voice-activated telephony systems or build wireless
applications that allow multimodal interaction with Web pages,
graphics, Web based forms, and Flash animations. The wide
variety of uses for multimodal technology in applications
include:
-
Web-based forms and Customer service
- Voice
navigated Web sites and internet kiosks
-
Workforce automation in mobile ERP and CRM
-
Distribution of online publishing and e-learning
“By
using speech as another input mode within Web pages, Voice
Web Studio increases the usability and accessibility of existing
Web sites. Voice Web Studio enables companies to increase
customer satisfaction, retention, and reach through existing
applications and services by creating Web pages that supply
multimodal access to information, including speaking and listening
to users on PDAs, laptops or desktops,” says Brian Ty
Graham, Chief Architect of Voice Web Solutions.
The
SALT Forum, founded by Cisco, Comverse, Intel, Microsoft,
Philips and SpeechWorks, developed the SALT (Speech Application
Language Tags) specification as a graceful extension to existing
Web programming models and markup languages such as HTML,
XHTML and XML. SALT facilitates speech interfaces that reside
alongside traditional Web input/output modes such as text,
audio, video and graphics.
"Development
tools that support SALT are important for the adoption of
SALT across the value chain and Voice Web Studio is a welcome
addition to the professional Web developer's toolkit,"
said Rob Kassel, SALT Forum representative. "By supporting
SALT in one of the most popular Web development environments,
it enables a large number of developers to build telephony
and multimodal applications quickly and easily using their
established skills. The SALT Forum is pleased to see Voice
Web Solutions adding support for SALT, since these kinds of
tools will only make it easier for developers to work with
SALT and will drive adoption of SALT throughout the industry."
Voice
Web Studio supports .NET, J2EE and other programming languages
by leveraging Dreamweaver MX, the world’s most popular
Web authoring tool. By adding support for the SALT specification
within Macromedia’s Dreamweaver MX development platform,
Voice Web Studio enables Web sites to recognize speaker input,
generate text-to-speech and play recorded audio. While Voice
Web Studio currently supports SALT 1.0, it’s inherent
extensibility supports future multimodal and proprietary platforms.
Speech technology is now a cost-effective, simple option for
enhancing content presentation on the visual Web by providing
multimodal voice capabilities.
About
the SALT Forum
The SALT Forum brings together a diverse group of companies
sharing a common interest in developing and promoting speech
technologies for multimodal and telephony applications. Founded
in 2001 and representing over 50 technology leaders, the SALT
Forum seeks to develop a royalty-free standard that augments
existing XML-based markup languages to provide spoken access
to many forms of content through a wide variety of devices.
Additional information on the SALT specification is available
on the Forum's Web site, www.SaltForum.org.
About
Voice Web Solutions
Voice Web Solutions is the premier provider of tools for developing
robust SALT and VoiceXML speech applications that enable mobile
and accessibility solutions to your most valuable information
through natural voice commands. Voice Web Solutions’
customers include companies developing multimodal and telephony
deployments within various vertical markets. Voice Web Solutions
is a privately held Seattle-based company founded by pioneers
in the Voice Web development community. With groundbreaking
development tools, Voice Web Solutions is leading the charge
for the adoption of speech technology for the accessibility,
telephony, wireless and telematics markets. For more information
about Voice Web Studio call us at +1 (206) 338-6632 or visit
www.VoiceWebSolutions.net.
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