Optimism is growing that the near future will witness rapid growth in human-computer interaction using voice. System prototypes have recently been built that demonstrate speaker-independent real-time speech recognition and understanding of naturally spoken utterances moderately sized vocabularies, and larger-vocabulary speech recognition systems are on the horizon. This chapter reviews application areas in which spoken interaction may play a significant role, assesses potential benefits of spoken interaction with machines, and attempts to compare voice with alternative and complementary modalities of human-computer interaction.
