From Talking and Listening Devices to Intelligent Communicative Machines

Having been 'in the business' of speech technology for over 50 years, I've had the pleasure of witnessing (and being involved first-hand) in many of the astounding developments that have led to the incredible solutions we have today. Indeed, my involvement in the field of spoken language has been somewhat of a love affair, and it's been a huge honour and privilege to have been working with so many excellent researchers on "the most sophisticated behaviour of the most complex organism in the known universe"! Although I've always been heavily committed to the establishment of machine learning approaches to spoken language processing - including publishing one of the first papers on the application of artificial neural networks to automatic speech recognition - my approach has always been one of attempting to uncover the underlying mechanisms of 'intelligent' (speech-based) interaction, on the basis that living systems are remarkably data-efficient in their learning. This talk will both look back (rather a long way) and look forward, asking the question how did we get here and where are we going? I hope that some of my insights may inspire others to follow a similar path.