A perspective on speech recognition

The authors outline the science behind speech recognition technology and describe briefly the contributions of engineering, computer science, and mathematics to it. They discuss the state-of-the-art in both technique and performance, including some examples of successful applications. This is followed by a critical evaluation of the technology with respect to technical, commercial, and societal criteria. They conclude that even with today's suboptimum technology, there are types of applications in which useful deployment is possible and desirable but that those applications that will transform our society must wait until speech recognizers have nearly the capabilities of humans.<<ETX>>