Is ASR ready for wireless primetime: measuring the core technology for selected applications

It is estimated that by the end of 2001 as many as 500 million people worldwide will use cellular services. The nature of hands-busy and eyes-busy situations inherent in the anywhere and anytime wireless communication paradigm presents exciting marketing opportunities and, at the same time, unique technical challenges to the current-generation automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology and its new applications. Current industry trends clearly show that incorporating ASR technology into existing or new wireless services as a replacement for touch-tone input is a natural progression in the user interface. But is the current-generation ASR technology ready for primetime over wireless channels? Both qualitative and quantitative assessments for the core technology must be adopted by the industry before answering this question. In this paper, we describe a set of benchmark tasks designed to evaluate the state-of-the-art ASR technologies and present the results of these benchmark tests on two commercially available software-based ASR systems that represent the best core ASR technology on the market