A Tutorial Introduction to Speech Application Language Tags (SALT)

These pages give a tutorial introduction to the use of the SALT mark-up language for the creation of spoken language dialogue applications on Windows PCs. SALT allows you to create web pages with both voice output and speech recognition. SALT integrates with Javascript so that you can build interactive web pages that accept keyboard, mouse and spoken input - and which respond using text, graphics, audio and spoken output. The tutorial examples use the free Microsoft Speech add-in for Internet Explorer and only require client-side scripting so can be run on a single Windows machine.

Tutorial Contents

1. Overview of SALT
2. Software development kit installation
3. A first web page: "Hello World!"
4. Simple speech recognition
5. The <PROMPT> element
6. Speech synthesis mark-up (SSML)
7. The <LISTEN> element
8. Speech recognition grammars
9. A simple speech dialogue application
10. A complete application: noughts and crosses
11. Index of examples

SALT Documentation

• K. Wang, "SALT: A Spoken language interface for web-based multimodal dialog systems", Proc. ICSLP 2002 (PDF)
• Speech Application Language Tags 1.0 Specification (PDF).
• Microsoft Speech Applications SDK Documentation

Other SALT Links

• SALT Forum.
• Microsoft Speech Applications Software Development Kit (SASDK) Version 1.0 download
• Microsoft SASDK Tips and Tricks.
• Microsoft Speech SDK Discussion Forum
• Voice Web Solutions - Developer Community

Feedback

I welcome feedback containing reports of errors or suggestions for improving the tutorial. Please mail your comments to . I'm afraid I cannot help with problems in your code!

A Tutorial Introduction to SALT

© 2005 Mark Huckvale, Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London