Speech and hearing for the next billion users

Abstract

Speech recognition has not withered in the years since John Pierce's 1969 editorial. Far from it, speech recognition is everywhere, and now works very reliably, even when speaking to a speech assistant in another room with music playing in the background. If the current speech technology is widely available to billions of users, then the next frontier is to provide the same technology to the next billion users (NBUs). In addition, all of us have limited capabilities to speak and understand the acoustic world around us, whether it rises to the level to be labeled a real disability, or arises due to fatigue or being distracted. The next frontier for speech and hearing is to accommodate all of our needs, disabled or not as they arise in the real world, for not just the first billion users, but the next billion, and the next billion after that. The available technologies include real-time speech recognition (and translation) for the hard of hearing, real-time speech enhancement, and auditory attention decoding from EEG signals.