Gaps in the technology of speech understanding

We have determined how the state of the art in speech recognition has advanced in recent years. We have surveyed recent accomplishments in research and system design, and have determined a number of gaps that exist in speech understanding technology. There is a limited but growing market acceptance for available isolated-word recognizers, and some uncertainty about the impact of recent advances in the understanding of spoken sentences. Future work must include new and improved system components and must make better use of language constraints and task requirements, to permit increasingly more natural man-computer interactions.