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Evolution of Speech Technology: Opportunities and Challenges in Europe

Explore the current state and future potential of speech technology, focusing on market trends, applications, and barriers to development in Europe. Discover how companies can compete with industry leaders and the role of research in advancing the field. Contact Silvia Mosso at silvia.mosso@loquendo.com or visit www.loquendo.com.

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Evolution of Speech Technology: Opportunities and Challenges in Europe

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  1. 1 The speech technology business and evolution scenario Silvia Mosso 22/11/2006 Multilinguism and Language Technology a Challenge for Europe workshop

  2. About Loquendo • A Telecom Italia Group company born in 2001 as a spin-off of Telecom Italia R&D center with over 30 years experience on Speech Technologies • Global presence in the European market, North and Latin America • Wide experience on National Research Projects • Significant experience in European Projects: IST LUNA, COMPANIONS, DIVINES, HIWIRE, SNOW, HOPS, SHARE, I-WAY, COVER, C@R, PANDORA, SMADA, SPOTLIGHT, eTEN Vocal Browsing, eVALUES • Main Products: Voice Technologies (Text to Speech (TTS), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speaker Verification (SV), Speech Suite (LSS) ) and Voice Platforms • Full support of international standards: VoiceXML, SAPI, MRCP, W3C SSML, SRG

  3. Current market driver: contextual utility Voice is being accepted as a natural way of interaction with devices Speech technology today is being integrated in car navigators 7m PND shipped in EMEA during 2005 12m expected to be shipped in 2006 > 1m are speech-enabled Source: Loquendo based on Canalys

  4. Current market driver: vertical applications • Public Transportation • Visually Impaired • Voice Picking and industrial applications

  5. The future Sophistication of Interaction Wide-domain Understanding “How may I help you ?” System driven dialogue Pervasivity

  6. Future market driver: pervasivity • Tomorrow potentially every device will have vocal and multimodal interfaces • Home appliances: commands • Set-top-boxes as voice-controlled home gateways • Mobile devices: more than easiness of use  natural interaction • Desktop applications: are speech interfaces the future? • Windows Vista provides embedded speech recognition / dictation technology

  7. Future markets and applications: SLU Telephone applications are evolving from vocal interaction to Spoken Language Understanding • The goal is the enhancement of human-machine interaction: • Overcome the distrust to communicate with a machine • Increase the automation rate of telephone services • Loquendo coordinates LUNA project: the objective is robust real time understanding of spontaneous speech, well beyond the state of the art • Portability across languages is a major challenge  inclusion of new EU countries

  8. Barriers to the development • Need to develop cross-lingual methodologies for development of voice technology  more efficiency • Portability to minor languages requires expensive linguistic resources • For pervasivity: miniaturisation, cost and performance trade-offs • For understanding: multilinguality requires massive investments and specific know-how: • Early results available today • Need for linguistic and acoustic resources • Speech market evolution • In the past decade there were several companies operating on speech market  possible to share costs of DBs • Today market has consolidated, cooperation is harder Need for massive investments that only large company can afford. A big problem for universities as well.

  9. European vs. US industry • Market leaders are IBM, Microsoft, Nuance How can smaller European companies compete with these ?

  10. What we expect from research • Human-like TTS: emotions, intonation • Robust ASR, understanding • “Open Source”-like availability of language resources • Remove technological barriers  cooperation between European technological leaders • More algorithmic efficiency, possible introduction of dedicated HW even for high-complexity tasks • Closer cooperation between Speech-HLT and Text-HLT

  11. Thank you for your attention! silvia.mosso@loquendo.com www.loquendo.com

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