A group including some of the largest technology companies Monday say they are squarely behind developing a new royalty-free, platform and independent standard called SALT (Speech Application Language Tags).

The idea is to make accessing the Web through voice commands possible from several different appliances and is expected to tack on to the end of existing markup languages such as HTML, xHTML and XML.

Once in place, users will be able to interact with an application in a variety of ways: They will be able to input data using speech and/or a keyboard, keypad, mouse or stylus, and produce data as synthesized speech, audio, plain text, motion video and/or graphics. Each of these modes could be used by themselves or in a combination of devices.

The announcement was made by Microsoft at its campus in Mountain View, California along with co-founding companies: Intel, Cisco Systems, Comverse, Philips and SpeechWorks.

As an open industry initiative, the newly founded SALT Forum will promote the specification and share intellectual property to develop it. A broad range of companies is expected to join the initiative.

Because SALT is independent of the underlying platform, developers will be able to add a speech interface to applications, making them accessible from telephones or other graphical interface-based devices.

The forum says SALT will simplify the creation of multimodal and telephony-enabled applications by supporting and extending the standard Web programming model and familiar markup languages. Developers will only need to add simple, lightweight SALT tags to existing applications, rather than rewrite the applications.

The forum founders expect to make the specification publicly available in the first quarter of 2002 and to submit it to a standards body by midyear.

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