Speech’s Evolving Role in Consumer Electronics…From Toys to Mobile

Abstract

This chapter examines the evolving market of speech in consumer ­electronics, and the advancing strategic importance of speech technology as it has moved into the mobile phone space. Providing an historical analysis of speech ­recognition in consumer devices, including toys, the chapter explores how the Smartphone has changed the face of speech recognition. In the past couple of years the mobile market has served as a galvanizing force and opened new horizons for speech technology and spoken language understanding in mobile devices. Vast amounts of data collected over phone lines have very rapidly allowed improvements in accuracy, such that a majority of users today are happy with the performance of speech recognition on mobile devices. The movement towards VUI based conversational agents has played a key role in this expanding market as well. Drawing from the author’s role in over 20 years of speech technology for consumer electronics and working on adding speech technology in products from ATT, Motorola, Hasbro, Mattel, Plantronics, Samsung, Sony, and VTech, the chapter provides insightful reflections on the evolving role of natural speech in mobile devices used by everyday consumers and the like.