The role of voice processing in telecommunications

During the decade of the 1990s, the fields of communications, computing, and networking are coming together in the form of personal information/communication terminals, and in the associated services (so-called personal communications services, PCS). Several technologies will play major roles in this communications revolution, but one of the key ones will be voice processing. The authors review several voice processing technologies, discuss current capabilities and the associated applications, and try to forecast where they see progress being achieved in the next decade and what applications will become commonplace as a result of the increased capabilities. They show how progress in voice processing is accompanied and stimulated by progress in microelectronics (memory and processing power of single chip architectures), and how, by the 21st century, telecommunications will have made major advances as a result of the use of voice processing.<>