[February 14, 2002]

Siemens To Contribute To SALT Forum

Siemens Enterprise Networks LLC, a subsidiary of Siemens AG, announced that it will participate as a contributor in the Speech Applications Language Tags (SALT) Forum. The SALT Forum is a joint initiative of industry leaders created to develop a royalty-free standard that augments existing Web mark-up languages. The standard aims to provide spoken access to many forms of content through telephony and multimodal access to information, applications, Web services from PCs, telephones, tablet PCs, and wireless PDAs.

"Twenty years ago, technology offered the promise that everyone would become untethered by mobile communications, and this has come to pass. However the promise of mobility would have been met more elegantly with broader global agreement on standards," said Sheila McGee-Smith, president of McGee-Smith Analytics. "The SALT Forum is an attempt by industry leaders, including Siemens, to ensure that multimodal access to information using speech technology follows a smooth path to realization," she continued. "I believe that one of the strongest roles Siemens can play in the SALT Forum derives from its experience with a truly global customer base -- including consumers, enterprises and carriers. Unlike the hodge-podge of CDMA, TDMA, and GSM protocols the industry is still working to rationalize in the mobile telephone world, through the SALT Forum, Siemens can help create a single standard for embedding speech technology in the full range of consumer, enterprise and carrier solutions," McGee-Smith concluded.

"Siemens envisions the SALT Forum as a means to develop technology for the expansion of 'Business over IP,'" said Jay Thomas, vice president of technology and innovation at Siemens Enterprise Networks. "Through our HiPath communication platforms and applications, we have gained years of important experience with applications using speech technology, such as our award-winning HiPath Xpressions unified communications product, which allows remote users to filter and listen to e-mail on their device of choice, including a cell phone," Thomas continued.

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, the Forum seeks to make a working draft of the SALT specification available for review in the first quarter of 2002 and submit it to a standards organization in mid-2002.

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