Two technologies vie for recognition in speech market

Improvements to voice-recognition algorithms and greater computing power have changed speech technology from an approach with limited uses to an increasingly important part of many applications. As this process has unfolded, developers have searched for an open standard, rather than proprietary development and runtime environments, that would let them easily and quickly add speech input/output capabilities to applications that function across platforms, said Inderpal Singh Mumick, founder and CEO of Kirusa, a wireless platform developer. Two principal approaches have resulted from this search: VoiceXML and SALT (speech application language tags).