Progress in speech research for telecommunications in the last five decades
Biing Hwang Juang · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2004
Speech is the most natural form of human communications. A significant portion of speech research in the last century was devoted to the development of knowledge and technologies that aim at extending such a fundamental human capability over a long distance and at automating the support for such an extension. For the former, devices such as new acoustic transducers and techniques such as speech coding and echo cancellation have led to superb speech communication quality even for people located continents apart. For the latter, techniques in speech synthesis, recognition and understanding have been incorporated in various communication systems that automate billions of telephone calls or remote transactions of various sorts with remarkable success. Jim Flanagan, who had led the team on speech and acoustics in Bell Labs for over three decades, was very much in the center of this tremendous progress. In this talk, we highlight some of the milestones, many directly inspired by Jim Flanagan, that were achieved in the last few decades in the area of speech technologies and systems that have brought us benefits in our everyday life.