Information technology is transforming the way we live, work, and interact with the things around us.  The computer, communications, and consumer electronics industries are merging and we will soon find that everything we interact with, from toys and telephones to cars and computers, will have more computing power than the fastest personal computer available today.  The machines of the future will do a lot more for us, provided that we can interact with them and tell them what we want.

A Sound idea

With voice recognition technology people will interact with machines in the same way they interact with people: through conversation.  Machines with conversational interfaces will be able to communicate using speech, natural language, and facial expressions; they will be able to engage in conversations; and they will be able to recognize, identify, and classify people by their voice and other biometric characteristics.

Today, we communicate with machines through direct manipulation of, say, light switches, steering wheels, air conditioner controls, or through graphical user interfaces, such as a mouse or touch screen.  Keyboards play a "key" role in the communication of text and complex commands.  But as the capabilities of machines continue to grow, none of these tools is adequate to the task of facilitating user-machine communications.

In our vision, speech will be used

 o by anyone

 o with any device

 o in virtually any environment

Our goal is to create the technologies to make this vision a reality.