Speech and language processing for next-millennium communications services

In the future, the world of telecommunications will be vastly different than it is today. The driving force will be the seamless integration of real time communications (e.g. voice, video, music, etc.) and data into a single network, with ubiquitous access to that network anywhere, anytime, and by a wide range of devices. The only currently available ubiquitous access device to the network is the telephone, and the only ubiquitous user access technology mode is spoken voice commands and natural language dialogues with machines. In the future, new access devices and modes will augment speech in this role, but are unlikely to supplant the telephone and access by speech anytime soon. Speech technologies have progressed to the point where they are now viable for a broad range of communications services, including: compression of speech for use over wired and wireless networks; speech synthesis, recognition, and understanding for dialogue access to information, people, and messaging; and speaker verification for secure access to information and services. The paper provides brief overviews of these technologies, discusses some of the unique properties of wireless, plain old telephone service, and Internet protocol networks that make voice communication and control problematic, and describes the types of voice services available in the past and today, and those that we foresee becoming available over the next several years.