Abstract
Over the last five years, we have witnessed significant progress in developing systems (and the underlying technologies) that can provide intuitive interfaces to computers using spoken language. The progress is largely spurred by government-sponsored projects in Europe and the US. The first half of this talk will introduce what these systems are all about and summarize achievements to date, with particular emphasis on the Spoken Language Systems Program sponsored by ARPA. The second half of the talk will be devoted to a discussion of some important technical challenges that must be met if such systems are to enjoy wide and successful deployment.This talk was originally delivered at the 1995 Association for Computational Linguistics meeting.