In 1997, and again in 2003, the author was invited to conduct a survey at the IEEE workshop on ‘Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding’ (ASRU) in which attendees were offered a set of statements about putative future events relating to progress in various aspects of speech technology R&D. The task of the respondents was to assign a date to each possible event. The 1997 and 2003 results were published at INTERSPEECH 2005 in Lisbon. Six years later, the author was invited by the organisers of ASRU’2009 to repeat the survey for a third time, and this paper presents the combined results from all three 1997, 2003 and 2009 surveys. The overall conclusion is that, over the twelve year period progress is perceived as slow, and the future appears to be generally no nearer than it has been in the past. However, on a positive note, the 2009 survey confirmed that the market for speech technology applications on mobile devices would be highly attractive over the next ten or so years. Index Terms : speech recognition, speech synthesis, survey of progress, future predictions
['Roger K. Moore']
Progress and Prospects for Speech Technology: Results from Three Sexennial Surveys