Applications of speech recognition in the area of telecommunications

Advances in speech recognition technology, over the past 4 decades (1950s to 1990s), have enabled a wide range of telecommunications and desktop services to become 'voice enabled'. Early applications were driven by the need to automate and thereby reduce the cost of attendant services, or by the need to create revenue generating new services which were previously unavailable because of cost, or the inability to adequately provide such a service with the available work force. As we move towards the future, we see a new generation of voice enabled service offerings emerging including intelligent agents, customer care wizards, call center automated attendants, voice access to universal directories and registries, unconstrained dictation capability, and finally unconstrained language translation capability. We review the current capabilities of speech recognition systems, show how they have been exploited in today's services and applications, and show how they will evolve over time to the next generation of voice enabled services.