The African Speech Technology project for tele-services: achievements, state of the technology and roadmap

The African Speech Technology project, sponsored by DACST´s Innovation Fund, aims to develop speech and language software tools and libraries to enable the implementation of tele-services (automated information and transaction systems over the telephone). We are adapting state-of-the-art speech technology (recognition and generation) to work in five South African languages. This paper gives an overview of achievements, the state of the technology and the road ahead.