A More Optimistic Outlook on the Future of Speech
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010The speech application industry got some critical press in recent months (here are some spirited responses, respectively.)
All the more refreshing to come across this New York Times article presenting current work in speech and artificial intelligence. The article highlights broadly what kind of AI applications have moved into the mainstream (or have potential to do so). Speech and natural language understanding, the article claims, have gone furthest.
One thing that is generalizable from both criticisms above is that development of speech-enabled applications has stagnated, in various ways1. The underlying technology – speech recognition (ASR) – has gone as far as it can. Application designers and developers haven’t adopted. Dictation has learned to understand doctors and lawyers better, but still struggles with conversational speech.
This point may have to be conceded. In terms of commercial applications however, especially speech-enabled voice (IVR) systems, the root cause for stagnation is not necessarily a failure of AI, rather than a maturing of standards and best-practices. Fulfilling expectations that voice applications, much like websites, behave according to certain rules is much to the advantage of the millions who interact with such systems every day.
What I walk away with from the generalized critical, as well as the Times’ optimistic perspective is that, short of a revolution in underlying technologies (which hardly anyone expects), filling practical, everyday niches is where things can still move forward for speech and language processing. These niches have certainly not been fully uncovered.
Thoughts?
1 Roughly summarized, Robert Fostner: “development in speech technology has flat-lined since 2001″; David Suendermann: “(statistical) engineering methods are more efficient than traditional symbolic linguistic approaches to language processing.”
