Multimodal access will enable users to interact with an application in a variety of ways: they will be able to input data using speech, a keyboard, keypad, mouse and/or stylus, and produce data as synthesized speech, audio, plain text, motion video, and/or graphics.
The SALT Forum was founded on October 15, 2001, by Microsoft, along with Cisco Systems, Comverse, Intel, Philips Consumer Electronics, and ScanSoft.
[1] The SALT 1.0 specification was submitted to the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) for review in August 2002.
[2] However, the W3C continued developing its VoiceXML 2.0 standard, which reached the final "Recommendation" stage in March 2004.
[3] By 2006, Microsoft realized Speech Server had to support the W3C VoiceXML standard to remain competitive.