Dennis Callaghan

The Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) Forum released a working draft of its 0.9 specification for adding speech tags to other Web application development languages on Wednesday. Applications created by that combination would combine speech recognition with text and graphics. The draft, published by the founding members of the SALT Forum—Cisco Systems Inc., Comverse Inc., […]

IBM today announced a new digital media strategy designed to speed up delivery of technology for managing audio, video and graphical elements from it and its partners. The centerpiece of the strategy is IBMs new Digital Media Factory platform, a framework that unifies existing hardware, software and services from IBM and partner companies. IBM hardware […]

Call it the shock of recognition—again. Just as VoiceXML-based speech recognition applications are hitting their stride, along comes a potentially competing standard backed by—who else?—Microsoft Corp. Since the VoiceXML 1.0 standard was put in place at the World Wide Web Consortium nearly two years ago, developers have been using the standard to incorporate speech recognition […]

While many speech technology companies have thrown their support behind the SALT Forum, VoiceXML remains their bread-and-butter speech platform, and theyre closely watching efforts to integrate it with XHTML as an alternative to Speech Application Language Tags for multimodal application support. Heres a look at some of the established players in speech technology as well […]

Momentum is building in the Lotus Domino developer community for a new, open-source initiative to create an alternative Java application development environment for the forthcoming Domino 6. The move follows plans IBM announced late last month to remove most of the current Java development environment, known as Garnet, from the final version of Domino 6. […]

eGain Communications Corp. has released an upgrade to its eGain Assistant intelligent agent application that officials said more accurately answers questions that consumers put to Web retailers. The software mimics an online customer service representative by responding to typed natural language queries with answers culled from a knowledge base. New in Version 5.0 of eGain […]

Combining portal and security technologies, Netegrity Inc. is building a new type of platform to provide secure application delivery and give IT managers a single point of administration for managing application access. The Netegrity SRM (Secure Relationship Management) Platform will provide an alternative to integration partnerships between portal and security vendors, which officials said is […]

Fueled by increasing demand for its hosted CRM applications, Salesforce.com Inc. plans to challenge major enterprise software vendors such as SAP AG with hosted back- office applications. The San Francisco company, which has attracted 3,800 paying customers for its hosted customer relationship management services in its three years of existence, will extend services to the […]

PlaceWare Inc. and eRoom Technology Inc. have enhanced their respective online collaboration software platforms, addressing some familiar enterprise computing concerns –security, business process automation and application integration. PlaceWare later this month will announce a new secure architecture known as iVault for its communications and collaboration platform. eRoom is adding support for cross-enterprise business processes, integration […]

Rival hosted customer relationship management application providers Salesforce.com Inc. and UpShot Corp. are going head-to-head at the Demo 2002 conference in Phoenix this week as both target enterprise-class customers. Salesforce.com is demoing its next offerings—the Salesforce.com Offline Edition and Enterprise Edition—which will be formally announced next Friday at the companys annual Freedom from Software celebration […]

EGain Communications Corp. will release Wednesday eGain Assistant 5.0, the latest iteration of its intelligent agent application. Egain Assistant 5.0, which mimics an online customer service representative by responding to natural language queries with answers culled from a knowledge base, has been upgraded so that it automatically converts knowledge, typically from Web FAQs, into “cases”—sets […]

New releases of web site analytics software and services highlight a resurgent market once thought to be subsumed by CRM and business intelligence software vendors. NetIQ Corp. last week unveiled its WebTrends Intelligence Suite, which features a new report design tool and pre-designed data warehouse tables. Also last week, DigiMine Inc. released the first of […]