Speech Processing for Vehicles: Whats Next?

A human voice is and remains the best form of communication. Therefore, spoken language interfaces to computers are a topic that has engaged engineers and speech scientists since the fifties. Once limited to the realm of science fiction, speech technology has now passed the threshold of practicality. The commercial deployment of these systems has already begun, although the applications are still specialized for certain purposes. This paper presents a speech recognition system that is particularly suited for drivers and passengers in a vehicle environment. The first chapter is describing a typical system design of today. Tens of thousands of these units are already in use. Thereafter a future system design will be described, in which the voice control of a navigation system is the most challenging problem. Finally the papers shows as an outlook, what comes next after the future. In particular, distributed speech processing systems will be used based on client-server architecture.