Progress and Prospects for Spoken Language Technology: What Ordinary People Think

Arguably the most significant milestone (so far) in the spoken language technology field was the appearance in November 2011 of Siri Apple’s voice-based ‘personal assistant and knowledge navigator’ for the iPhone. Siri brought the potential of spoken language technology to the attention of the wider general public, and speech finally became “mainstream”. This meant that ordinary people suddenly had an informed opinion about the merits (or otherwise) of using their voice to access information, send messages and control their smart devices. So, this paper presents the results of two surveys that were conducted in order to find out what ordinary people think about contemporary spoken language technology. The first used a modified version of the surveys conducted every six years at the IEEE ASRU series of workshops, and the second addressed questions about the awareness and usage of speech technology by members of the general public. The overall results suggest that ordinary people are more optimistic than the experts about what spoken language technology might have to offer, but usage patterns reveal that the majority of end users still prefer typing to talking, with accuracy, privacy and online accessibility cited as the main impediments to wider take-up.