Over the past year, the rapid development of speech recognition technology has aroused great interest in the industry. Technological advances in this area include background noise filtering, as well as the improvement on detecting various dialects and interpretation capability.
    Mike Phillips, founder and CTO of SpeechWorks, said in automotive applications, this design allows users to choose whether to launch the speech recognition function on a mobile phone or a car, or add it to the network. This flexibility is particularly useful in the automobile market, as the emergence of Bluetooth and other wireless technologies has already attracted OEM from the traditional information and communication services (telematics), said Mike Bryars, the senior manager of speech technology development in Visteon Company.
    In the traditional information and communication business, a phone was embedded in a box in the car, when picking or dialing a phone call, a specific automoblie service provider should be called first. Bryars considered that using wireless technology and increasingly sophisticated speech recognition software can allow clients to use their own mobile phones in their car.
    In order to support this function, Visteon is integrating speech recognition and microphone with an external antenna into the car stereo.
According to Bryan Coley, a wireless application manager in TI, as an option of OMAP platform, TI also offers speech recognition software, including SpeechWorks products. OMAP platform is an application for 2.5G and 3G mobile phone chipset, which integrates a DSP core, ARM microprocessor and a range of peripherals.
    Mobile phone users can download data such as weather or stock information to their cell phones, they can use the text - Speech Engine to listen to these messages when convenient. The additive speech recognition engine runs on DSP and stored in the DSP memory.
    Japan's industrial giant Mitsubishi also assesses all kinds of speech recognition engines through its' R&D institutions, the Mitsubishi electrical research laboratory.
    "We are making efforts, which also matches with the increasingly industrial concerning with the voice recognition." a spokesman from Mitsubishi said. The company plans to adopt using speech recognition technology in 6-12 months.
    On the one hand, designers of some other small companies like the AT&T Lab, IBM, and SpeechWorks are constantly improving the speech recognition technology; on the other hand, the market also needs a smaller hand-held mobile devices, Aurica Yen , the analyst in Yankee Group believes.
    Although the market is difficult to predict, it is estimated that about 30% of wireless users interested in the advanced speech recognition functions. Many operators have launched a limited speech recognition services, Yen predicts that operators is expected to provide more text - voice functions during the year.