The speech technology business and evolution scenario 1 Silvia Mosso 1 22/11/2006 Multilinguism and Language Technology a Challenge for Europe workshop The speech technology business and evolution scenario Silvia Mosso

The speech technology business and evolution scenario 2 Silvia Mosso A Telecom Italia Group company born in 2001 as a spin-off of Telecom Italia R&D center with over 30 years experience on Speech Technologies Global presence in the European market, North and Latin America Wide experience on National Research Projects Significant experience in European Projects: IST LUNA, COMPANIONS, DIVINES, HIWIRE, SNOW, HOPS, SHARE, I-WAY, COVER, PANDORA, SMADA, SPOTLIGHT, eTEN Vocal Browsing, eVALUES Main Products: Voice Technologies (Text to Speech (TTS), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speaker Verification (SV), Speech Suite (LSS) ) and Voice Platforms Full support of international standards: VoiceXML, SAPI, MRCP, W3C SSML, SRG About Loquendo

The speech technology business and evolution scenario 3 Silvia Mosso Current market driver: contextual utility Voice is being accepted as a natural way of interaction with devices Speech technology today is being integrated in car navigators 7m PND shipped in EMEA during m expected to be shipped in 2006 > 1m are speech-enabled Source: Loquendo based on Canalys

The speech technology business and evolution scenario 4 Silvia Mosso Current market driver: vertical applications Public Transportation Visually Impaired Voice Picking and industrial applications

The speech technology business and evolution scenario 5 Silvia Mosso The future Pervasivity Sophistication of Interaction Wide-domain Understanding System driven dialogue “How may I help you ?”

The speech technology business and evolution scenario 6 Silvia Mosso Future market driver: pervasivity Tomorrow potentially every device will have vocal and multimodal interfaces –Home appliances: commands –Set-top-boxes as voice-controlled home gateways –Mobile devices: more than easiness of use  natural interaction Desktop applications: are speech interfaces the future? –Windows Vista provides embedded speech recognition / dictation technology

The speech technology business and evolution scenario 7 Silvia Mosso Future markets and applications: SLU Telephone applications are evolving from vocal interaction to Spoken Language Understanding The goal is the enhancement of human-machine interaction: –Overcome the distrust to communicate with a machine –Increase the automation rate of telephone services Loquendo coordinates LUNA project: the objective is robust real time understanding of spontaneous speech, well beyond the state of the art Portability across languages is a major challenge  inclusion of new EU countries

The speech technology business and evolution scenario 8 Silvia Mosso Barriers to the development Need to develop cross-lingual methodologies for development of voice technology  more efficiency Portability to minor languages requires expensive linguistic resources For pervasivity: miniaturisation, cost and performance trade-offs For understanding: multilinguality requires massive investments and specific know-how: –Early results available today –Need for linguistic and acoustic resources Speech market evolution –In the past decade there were several companies operating on speech market  possible to share costs of DBs –Today market has consolidated, cooperation is harder Need for massive investments that only large company can afford. A big problem for universities as well.

The speech technology business and evolution scenario 9 Silvia Mosso European vs. US industry Market leaders are IBM, Microsoft, Nuance How can smaller European companies compete with these ?

The speech technology business and evolution scenario 10 Silvia Mosso What we expect from research Human-like TTS: emotions, intonation Robust ASR, understanding “Open Source”-like availability of language resources Remove technological barriers  cooperation between European technological leaders More algorithmic efficiency, possible introduction of dedicated HW even for high-complexity tasks Closer cooperation between Speech-HLT and Text-HLT

The speech technology business and evolution scenario 11 Silvia Mosso Thank you for your attention!