Philips Announces Availability of SALT Browser

DALLAS, TX - Philips Speech Processing, a business unit of Royal Philips Electronics and a provider of speech-enabled business solutions for telecoms, financial institutions, call centers and other industries, developed the new SALT Browser to meet the increasing customer demand for standardization and flexibility of application development. SALT standardizes how speech input and output works for web applications and enables developers to embed speech enhancements into existing HTML, xHTML and XML pages by using languages, technologies and toolkits they have been familiar with for years. Philips' SALT Browser is based on SALT standards and connects speech processing and telephony resources with application components. This new browser will enable companies to extend their existing web applications through the use of voice access, which can be added to a web application by using existing infrastructure, application and languages like Java or ECMA Script. The additional voice interface will extend existing web-based services from web-only to web and voice access. The browser also allows companies to individually select their preference of web or voice to access the requested information. "Philips' SALT Browser allows businesses to leverage their investments in business logic and back-end database connectivity," said Matthias Pankert, director of product strategy and planning at Philips Speech Processing. "It eliminates the need to create discrete applications for web and telephone. In addition, our customers will be able to minimize investments in cost and complexity from the ability to offer existing web-based applications also by voice." Philips' SALT Browser will be made available later this year as part of SpeechMania 8.0, Philips' platform that supports both natural language as well as TrueDialogue technology. Philips recently finalized the first prototype of SpeechMania 8.0 that was designed using the SALT specification version 1.0 principles. The SALT Browser is built in Java 2 and ECMA Script and thus operating platform independent. With its SALT products and expertise, Philips will also assist partners in SALT-enabling their platforms, thereby offering the means to deploy Philips' TrueDialogue in any environment and on almost any existing telephony platform.