I came to Microsoft Research in March 1998, first as a Researcher in the speech technology group working on the areas of spoken language understanding (SLU) and multimodal dialog systems. I contributed to the project MiPad and created the Speech Application Language Tags, or SALT that was later submitted to the world wide web consortium (W3C) and now part of the international standards ISO/IEC 18051/ECMA-269/ETSI TS 102 173, ISO/IEC 18056/ECMA-323/ETSI TS 101 990, and ECMA-348. An object model version, described in this TR I wrote, has entered its final phase of being standardized. I also contributed to W3C Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS), W3C Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), and various other publications from W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group.