Hype or Ready for Prime Time?

Abstract

The pervasiveness of mobile handheld devices and advancement in real-time continuous speech recognition technology has opened up a wide range of research opportunities in human-computer interaction for those devices. On the one hand, there has been an increasing amount of research on developing user-friendly speech recognition solutions and applications for mobile handheld devices. On the other hand, there are many distinct challenges in mobile speech recognition. Aiming to gain a good understanding of this emerging yet challenging area and provide a research map, this paper presents a state-of-the-art overview of this field. We will discuss three main architectures of mobile speech recognition systems, analyze their strengths and weaknesses, introduce some major research issues in the field, and highlight a number of major applications of speech recognition on handheld devices. The authors will also shed some light into important future research issues as a road map for researchers and practitioners.