The speech technology business and evolution scenario

The speech technology business and evolution scenario 1Silvia Mosso 1

22/11/2006Multilinguism and Language Technology a Challenge for Europe workshop

The speech technology business and evolution scenario

Silvia Mosso

The speech technology business and evolution scenario 2Silvia Mosso

• 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

About Loquendo


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


Current market driver: vertical applications

• Public Transportation

• Visually Impaired

• Voice Picking and industrial applications


The future

Pervasivity

Sophistication of Interaction

Wide-domain Understanding

System driven dialogue

“How may I help you ?”


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


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


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.


European vs. US industry

• Market leaders are IBM, Microsoft, Nuance

How can smaller European companies compete with these ?


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


Thank you for your attention!

[email protected]

www.loquendo.com

The speech technology business and evolution scenario

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