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The speech technology business and evolution scenario

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

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The speech technology business and evolution scenario

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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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