But there's no widespread use of speech technology in Japan. The Europeans are doing very good work. Part of the reason that speech systems are advancing in Europe is by necessity, because of the pan-linguistic culture. The component technology has to be better. Also, the Web is changing things in a fundamental way.
People know that the information they want is out there on the Web if they can just get to it.
That's the power of speech systems. The Galaxy architecture we used to build Jupiter and other speech systems at MIT was first conceived and implemented without the benefit of the Web. Now, Galaxy lives inside of a browser. The Web opens up a vast array of information that we can pluck from databases using a voice interface and deliver over a phone. That means machines are beginning to serve humans.