On the Role of Hearing Research in Contemporary Speech Technology Oded Ghitza Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs. This talk first highlights points in the history of hearing research at Bell Labs relevant to speech technology. It then discusses some of the new and emerging challenges and some recent activities designed to meet them. This work was driven by the need for knowledge to guide the development of the Bell System telephone network. In recent years major changes in network infrastructure are occurring, first in the Internet domain and now also in the Wireless domain.
New hardware provides networks with much higher data rates.
Developing these new coding systems needs knowledge of how a human listener perceives such complex acoustic images. Major advances have also occurred in man-machine dialogue systems. Research in speech perception is needed to guide efforts to improve the naturalness of synthetic voice, and to achieve robust recognition given a variety of speakers and a noisy environment. Your comments and inquiries are welcome.