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Saturday, June 25, 2005

Where are the SALT Hosting Providers?

Just where are all the SALT hosting providers out there? Message Technology's press release this week raises this interesting question. Consider for example this quote:

"By offering the SALT hosting environment in conjunction with industry standard VoiceXML hosting platforms, MTI will make available to customers a range of hosting options not offered through other industry-wide hosters. "

In other words, what is being said here is that unlike industry standard VoiceXML, for which there is not shortage of hosting providers, very few hosting providers have decided to host SALT applications. Which of course begs the question, why is this the case? Consider a few facts:
  • The SALT specification has been publically available since Microsoft launched the SALT Forum, way back in summer of 2001. That's four long years ago, yet there is precious little takeup of the specification in the market.
  • The SALT Forum itself hasn't issued a press release for exactly two years now.
  • The Microsoft Speech Server has been shipping with SALT support for over a year, and despite the initial hype it has gained very little traction in the market place.

It is quite likely here that what is happening is that there are a few firms willing to bet on SALT, simply because Microsoft is behind it, and that fact alone means it just might someday succeed. That explaination aside, what continues to baffle spkydog is why Microsoft insists on ignoring industry standard VoiceXML? Even if they eventually get a toe-hold in the marketplace with SALT by using brute force, why waste all that energy swimming upstream? Imagine what would happen if Microsoft added fully compliant VoiceXML 2.x support to MSS and offered it at low cost? If Microsoft expects to make a dent in the new Nuance/Scansoft's combined marketshare (over 70% of the ASR server ports deployed if I have my data correct) supporting VoiceXML would be one reasonable way of accomplishing it.

For some reason, spkdog suspects that the folks behind VoiceXML prefer the status quo. :-)

by spkydog @ 7:46:00 AM   Bookmark and Share
1 comments links to this post

1 Comments:

At 1:08 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

There are some interesting nods to other W3C voice standards in the SALT specification. You can use SRGS grammars with SALT, and it looks like SSML is also supported.

Also, If I understand the CCXML spec correctly, there is no requirement that the dialogs called from within a CCXML application need to be VoiceXML. Theoretically, these dialogs could be constructed with SALT (I think).

Your observations about the uptake of SALT seem right on - I can hardly call to mind anyone who is currently supporting SALT, and I can't think of any voice platform that isn't supporting VoiceXML.

It looks like there was an intersting Open Source project to create a SALT platform cooking over at Carnegie Mellon University at one time. I don't think anything has happened with this in a while. Pity.

 

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