Importance of spoken language systems

At the present stage, it is not possible to have a complete overview of the possibilities and future development in the area of spoken language systems, but what is entirely clear is that this field still holds an enormous potential. Dictation software has reached the market and after some initial problems they now prove to be usable and easy to handle tools, certainly with some weaknesses, but most weeknesses will be worked out due to further developments. Speaker recognition systems and speaker verification systems are tested for a wider range of application, for example for the usage in the security industry (e.g. cash machines in a bank can be supplied by speaker verification or recognition systems in the near future). Multimodal systems are worked on in laboratories but are not yet or at least not widespread on the market. Here lies one of the greatest potentials in human-computer communication.

Obviously, dealing with spoken language systems and with terminology that is involved in this domain is necessary.

Thorsten Trippel
Fri May 21 13:04:11 MET DST 1999