Speech-Enabled Applications

As humans, we see, hear, feel and smell. Human interaction is enriched by the resulting redundancy introduced by multimodal communication. In contrast, computer interfaces have relied primarily on visual interaction — today’s interfaces are like the silent movies of the past! As we approach the turn of the century, computers now have the ability to talk, listen and perhaps, even understand. Technological advances in the areas of speech synthesis and recognition, combined with the availability of computational power on the desktop that a few years ago could be found only in research labs, makes it possible to enrich human-computer interaction in ways that would once have counted as pure science-fiction.