The SALT Forum, a group of companies with a shared goal of accelerating the use of speech technologies in multimodal and telephony systems, announced that it has published a SALT profile for the W3C SVG markup language. The SVG profile supplements the SALT 1.0 specification, which was contributed to the W3C by the SALT Forum and already included profiles for use with the XHTML and SMIL specifications. By adding SALT to SVG, developers can further enhance the user experience with interactive spoken interfaces coupled directly to the visual interface. SVG with SALT provides the means to build sophisticated mobile applications for devices with easy-to-use speech interfaces that are accessible without looking at or touching the equipment. SVG with SALT can be used to provide speech “hot spots” within a graphic or provide spoken commands for scrolling and zooming the display. It can also be used to embed descriptive services for the visually impaired directly within a graphic, streamlining the workflow process. The SALT specification was designed to add speech input, speech output and call control capabilities to practically any XML-based language. www.saltforum.org