Program of the European communities for the European speech technology
Jan Roukens · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1988
Considering the strategic importance and potential size of the speech technology market, the European Commission helps the technological advance of laboratories and industries in this area by financing a series of projects within the ESPRIT program. These projects bring the best European laboratories and advanced industries together for cooperation in this area, and are oriented in four directions: (1) acquisition of basic knowledge about languages and human factors in human-machine speech dialogue; (2) advancement of existing techniques, e.g., speaker-dependent and independent recognition, coding, synthesis, speaker identification, etc.; (3) development and integration of knowledge-based techniques; and (4) development of speech assessment technology. These projects put emphasis on the multilinguism of recognition and synthesis. Multilinguism is considered to be prerequisite for the success of products on the international market. Some projects have just started; others are almost completed. For example, the project “Linguistic Analysis of European Languages” will reach completion at the end of 1988 and has built a knowledge base containing the necessary rules to solve ambiguities in phoneme-to-grapheme and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for eight European languages. In addition, and by way of example, synthesizers and recognizers have been built for French and Italian, and a speaker verifier. This work will continue to be strongly encouraged in the future.