Spoken communication is what largely separates humans from other animals. It permits us to communicate information effectively and with little apparent effort. Although online text and video resources have vastly increased our ability to communicate with each other via computer technology, speech is still the means of communication used first and foremost by humans for information exchange. Can advances in speech recognition, speaker recognition, and speech synthesis make spoken language as convenient and as accessible as online text as a means of communicating via computer technology? In this symposium, these three technologies--speech recognition, speaker recognition, speech synthesis--will be surveyed from an historical perspective and in the context of social factors that have affected technological trends. The symposium will begin with a presentation that provides a general overview of the field. Pairs of experts will then survey recent progress in each of the three technologies, compare the technology with human performance, discuss applications, show demonstrations, and make some predictions for the future. Both industrial and academic aspects of the technologies will be considered.

Presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Saturday, February 19, 2000, from 3:00pm - 6:00pm.

Supported in part by the Acoustical Society of America.