Voice Web Solutions Releases SALT Development Tool

SEATTLE, WA - Voice Web Solutions Inc., a developer of tools for speech technology companies, announced 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 enhances how developers create voice-enabled Web content. Voice Web Studio is the a tool that enables 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. 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 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 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 an option for enhancing content presentation on the visual Web by providing multimodal voice capabilities.