Speech Technology Opportunities and Challenges

Summary form only given. Two forces are in pursuit of discovering the possibilities of speech technology automation. First is the global research and development community which has been hard at work for improving the performance and usability of the technology. Second is the business community which constantly evaluates the performance of the technology against the expectation of the user community for delivering solutions such as a spoken car navigation system. While the performance improvement has been on a constant positive progress curve, the market opportunity has been on a much more uncertain curve. For example, the early vision of delivering a dictation solution has been on hold in recent years while it enjoyed enormous interest in the 90 s. At the same time, some industry experts predict that this vision will be fulfilled soon because of the usability needs of billions of mobile devices in use today. Analogies can be drawn for the use of speech technologies for call centers self service interaction. While we have seen a much bigger market success, some industry experts predict that web self services will slow down the use of speech self service. So, where does the truth lie? What are those market opportunities that are clear winners? What opportunities will open up in future and what are their technical challenges? In this talk, we will address some of these questions.