Next major application systems and key techniques in speech recognition technology

We discuss several major speech recognition applications which will contribute to some human activities in a decade. At first, Japanese speech-related national projects directed toward future intelligent systems are reviewed. Then we discuss three systems as the next major speech applications: substantially robust systems, multimodal interaction systems and multilingual dialogue systems. The evaluation of the performance of these systems is separately discussed in view of both total systems and specific technologies. We suggest that the degree of the difficulty of some kinds of specific tasks can be even more precisely measured, while the total system performance evaluation will become more difficult in future complex systems. Last, we take up phrase spotting, distance calculation for phonetic symbol sequences, adaptation/learning, and software modularization/multi-agents as the key techniques in constructing the above applications