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.