An overview of speech technology for telecom services in the United Kingdom

With over 150 different telephony providers currently competing to deliver services to a population of around 60 million people the UK has become a major test-bed for innovative telephony based technologies. Amongst these, speech technology has been particularly important and has been used to launch new services, add value to existing services and provide useful product differentiation. But it is speech recognition and text to speech which excites most interest for the future and which is expected to set the pace of advanced applications. This paper provides an overview of the UK experience in applying these new technologies, especially speech recognition, to the world of telecommunications.