Cooperative speech technology projects—The Swedish perspective
Bjöm Granström · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1988
Speech research has historically held a very strong place in Sweden, especially considering its small population of less than 9 million inhabitants. However, the industrial base for speech technology development is rather small. This is also true for many other countries in Europe. The multitude of small national languages asks for a wide spread of research activities on language specific topics. Cooperation both in research and speech technology product development has recently been started to overcome some of these problems. Sweden, which is still not part of the European Community, has until now been to some extent restricted in that work. The advent of ESCA, the European Speech Communication Association, and the new possibility for noncommunity countries to take part in, e.g., ESPRIT projects mean that Sweden now is taking full part in the growing European cooperation in this area. Some of that work will be described and some cooperative projects between the Nordic countries will be presented. A national Swedish program related to information technology development will also be discussed. This program is financed jointly by The Swedish Board for Technical Development and The Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. This acknowledgment of the nature of the subject area will stimulate new formations of cross-disciplinary cooperation.