Abstract
SpeechWorks has spent the last six years building technology and services that allow the deployment of large-scale telephone-based spoken dialog systems. These deployments require a combination of core speech technologies, development methods focused on the overall user experience, plus significant effort on platforms and overall system integration. We have made significant progress in all of these areas over the past few years, resulting in increasing market adoption of these interactive dialog systems. In this talk, I will provide a history of what we’ve done so far, an overview of what we consider to be the current state-of-the-art of the core technologies, and then discuss what we think will be the next important developments.

Biography
Michael Phillips is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of SpeechWorks International. For the seven years prior to starting SpeechWorks he was a Research Scientist in MIT’s Spoken Language Systems Group. Mr. Phillips was been responsible for many aspects of the core technology that SpeechWorks has licensed from MIT including acoustic modeling, lexical access, and integration with natural language constraints.Prior to joining the group at MIT in 1987, he worked on speech recognition at Carnegie-Mellon University and Scott Instruments Corp. He received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1982.