Speech recognition technology in the ubiquitous/wearable computing environment

Due principally to the technology of making computers smaller, more powerful and cheaper, the ubiquitous and wearable computing era is expected to come into being in the beginning of 21st century. In such an environment, speech recognition will be widely used as one of the principal methods of human-computer interaction, and in most of cases it will be performed using a microphone and a networked computer worn and tailored to each person. Accordingly, speech recognition systems will comprise very different structures than do present systems. Promptly retrieving environmental information, such as noise, which is regularly monitored by computers, and task-dependent information transmitted according to each application to the personalized recognizers will significantly improve system adaptability to the new tasks and robustness. Nonetheless, a number of salient issues remain to be resolved to generate the ubiquitous/wearable computing environment