21st century user interfaces within the telecommunication industry: Speech processing is the key
Jay Wilpon · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1998
As we move into the 21st century, several market factors will play a key role in the success of telecommunication-based services. Such factors include: The merging of the computer and telephony industries is moving ahead at an ever-increasing pace. Barriers-to-entry for new companies wishing to enter traditional telephony businesses are dropping. The union of the computer and telephony industries will lead to effective integration of voice, traditional data, and video, enabling the creation of new services that are more robust, intelligent, and accessible than services that are currently available. People will not be asking for technology, they will be asking for a simpler and easier lifestyle. Given these factors, what will differentiate 21st century telecommunications services from each other are innovative, compelling 21st century user interfaces that create a media center unifying emerging desktop services with traditional telephony services. Such user interfaces will lead to smarter services. As networks automatically learn their customers’ needs and wants, and customers invest their time to learn these intelligent user interfaces, a bond will be formed. Key to this vision is the availability of robust large vocabulary speech recognition, spoken language understanding, and text-to-speech synthesis technologies that allow customers to access information and each other anywhere, anytime.