Speech processing: An evolving technology

As we enter the information age, speech processing is emerging as an important technology for making machines easier and more convenient for humans to use. It is both an old and a new technology — dating back to the invention of the telephone and forward, at least in aspirations, to the capabilities of HAL in 2001. Explosive advances in microelectronics now make it possible to implement economical real-time hardware for sophisticated speech processing — processing that formerly could be demonstrated only in simulations on main-frame computers. As a result, fundamentally new product concepts — as well as new features and functions in existing products — are becoming possible and are being explored in the marketplace. As the introductory piece to this issue, we draw a brief perspective on the evolving field of speech processing and assess the technology in the three constituent sectors: speech coding, synthesis, and recognition.