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<Paper uid="W02-1301">
  <Title>SPEECH-RELATED TECHNOLOGIES Where will the field go in 10 years?</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The term speech-related research has been chosen to designate the topic of the present paper for lack of ability to invent a more appropriate term, if there is one. At least, the term partly manages to convey the author's expectation that the field of speech research will change rather dramatically in the coming ten years as speech technologies become merged with other technologies into a field which, so far, lacks a name.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> According to many observers, the coming decade will be the decade of speech technologies.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Computer systems, whether stationary or mobile, wired or wireless, will increasingly offer users the opportunity to interact with information and people through speech. This has been made possible by the arrival of relatively robust, speaker-independent, spontaneous (or continuous) spoken dialogue systems in the late 1990s as well as through the constantly falling costs of computer speed, bandwidth, storage, and component miniaturisation. The presence of a speech recogniser in most appliances combined with distributed speech processing technologies will enable users to speak their native tongue when interacting with computer systems for a very large number of purposes. Although no doubt exaggerated as just presented, there probably is some truth to this vision of a breakthrough in the application of speech technologies in the coming years. If this is the case, it would seem worthwhile that we lift our sights and take a long-term view of the issues ahead. This may help setting a reasonable research agenda for the coming years of advanced speech systems research and development, one which does not succumb to the usual hype associated with fashionable technologies. Today, some believe that &amp;quot;the speech problem&amp;quot; has been solved already. Some believe that speech, because of its naturalness, is the solution to every conceivable problem of user-system interaction. On the other hand, surprising as it may seem, some human factors and interactive systems experts believe that we have just arrived at the touch-tone telephony stage and share no notion of the actual state-of-the-art in the field with its practitioners. Since all of those beliefs are far from the truth, it is important to provide a more balanced picture of the state-of-the-art in speech technologies in order to set the stage for solid progress.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In what follows, Section 2 presents some trends in the speech-related research field. Section 3 excels in guesswork by estimating the times of appearance of a range of novel speech-related technologies. Section 4 discusses implications of the timelines presented in Section 3. Section 5 proposes a series of actions which would appear appropriate given the preceding discussion.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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