Commercial Exploitation

The quality of the work done by the CUED speech group has also attracted commercial interest. In 1995, Entropic Cambridge Research Ltd (ECRL) was formed as a collaboration between Entropic Research Laboratory Inc based in Washington DC and Cambridge University. In 1998, ECRL merged with the parent company and in November 1999, it was acquired by Microsoft. With Microsoft backing, Entropic is continuing to grow its operation in Cambridge and is now developing speech recognition server technology to enable direct access to web-sites using voice.

Current Research

Although much has been achieved over the last decade, speech recognition technology is still limited and new research continues apace. Work on the core technology continues with research into new ways of building acoustic models and statistical grammars. The work on broadcast news transcription has been integrated with information retrieval algorithms to allow news stories to be retrieved from audio and video archives. Click here to see a demonstration*. New work has started on methods for building interactive dialogue systems and there is a growing emphasis on web-related applications.

For more information see the Speech Research web page.

* Real Audio Player is required to listen to the audio files in the demonstration.