Ubiquitous speech processing

In the ubiquitous (pervasive) computing era, it is expected that everybody will access information services anytime anywhere, and these services are expected to augment various human intelligent activities. Speech recognition technology can play an important role in this era by providing: (a) conversational systems for accessing information services and (b) systems for transcribing, understanding and summarizing ubiquitous speech documents such as meetings, lectures, presentations and voicemails. In the former systems, robust conversation using wireless handheld/hands-free devices in the real mobile computing environment will be crucial as will multimodal speech recognition technology. To create the latter systems, the ability to understand and summarize speech documents is one of the key requirements. The paper presents technological perspectives and introduces several research activities being conducted from these standpoints in our research group.