MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—A broad spectrum of technology companies, including Cisco Systems Inc., Comverse Inc., Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., Philips Speech Processing and SpeechWorks International Inc., have agreed to form a forum to develop a platform-free standard for multi-modal and telephony-enabled access to information, applications and Web services for personal digital assistants, and other appliances.
The forum called Speech Application Language Tags, or SALT, which will extend markup languages such as HTML, xHTML and XML, will make it easier and faster to create, deploy and use applications and services.
