Directions for speech research

This report on a panel discussion during a recent conference on speech research reveals some of the dominant problems of present speech investigations. Experts from diverse speech fields talked about the need for better models, the problem of finding applications of automatic speech recognition, the need for deeper studies of human speech perception, and the effects of context. The search for invariants in speech continues. Overall, the discussions reveal that there has come about, for both practical and theoretical reasons, a need to treat speech perception with the same emphasis that acoustic analyses and speech production are receiving.¿N. L.