Competing speech-recognition standards, SALT and VoiceXML, are remarkably similar in what they achieve. But for the developer, there are important distinctions in how each language behaves. Microsoft's Stephen Potter details the technical and philosophical differences between the two so you can choose the right specification for your needs.
by Stephen Potter, Microsoft Corporation and SALT Forum Technical Working Group
October 21, 2002
ALT and VoiceXML are both markup languages for writing applications that use voice input and/or output. Both languages were developed by industry consortia (the SALT Forum and the VoiceXML Forum, respectively), and both were contributed to W3C as part of their ongoing work on speech standards.
So why two specifications? Mainly because they were designed to address different needs, and they were designed at different stages in the life cycle of the Web. VoiceXML arose out of a need to define a markup language for over-the-telephone dialogs—Interactive Voice Response, or IVR, applications—and at a time (1999) when many pieces of the Web infrastructure as we know it today had not matured. SALT arose out of the need to enable speech across a wider range of devices, from telephones to PDAs to desktop PCs, and to allow telephony (voice-only) and multimodal (combined voice and visual) dialogs. SALT was also designed at a time (2002) when many key Web technologies have become well-established (XML, DOM, XPath, etc.).
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