SPEECH RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY IN MULTIMODAL/UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS

In the ubiquitous (pervasive) computing era, it is expected that everybody will access information services anytime anywhere, and these services are expected to augment various human intelligent activities. Speech recognition technology can play an important role in this era by providing: (a) conversational systems for accessing information services and (b) systems for transcribing, understanding and summarising ubiquitous speech documents such as meetings, lectures, presentations and voicemails. In the former systems, robust conversation using wireless handheld/hands-free devices in the real mobile computing environment will be crucial, as will multimodal speech recognition technology. To create the latter systems, the ability to understand and summarise speech documents is one of the key requirements. This chapter presents technological perspectives and introduces several research activities being conducted from these standpoints.