Abstract:
Historically, the first major revolution in communications occurred around the turn of the 20th century when the concept of ``Universal Service'' became the rallying point for creating a system where everyone had access to a telephone and could connect automatically and without operator assistance to any other telephone user. The next major revolution in communications, which began about a decade ago and will take us well into the next century, promises to deliver to every home and office the capability of multimedia communications with seamless, and easy-to-use, integration of voice, image, video, handwriting, and data. Speech processing plays a major role in this communications revolution by providing the coding technologies that allow people to efficiently store and transmit speech and audio, and by providing machines with a mouth (to speak to a customer), with an ear (to listen to a customer), and with the ability to understand what is being spoken. Related work in user interfaces provides the easy-to-use mechanisms for technology integration. This talk will review the current status of technology in several areas of speech processing and will discuss the research and technology opportunities that will be seen in the next several years.