Overview of speech research in Italy: National and European projects

A survey of speech research that is being conducted in Italy both in academic and in industrial institutions is presented. Several groups are currently working on speech technology and research in Italy but no efforts to integrate their activities toward common goals have been so far pursued mostly because no nationwide project has been organized and financed to promote their cooperation. Few commendable exceptions can be listed for which the collaboration between national groups has produced satisfactory results. The support for large‐scale man‐machine vocal interfaces programs has been granted instead by a number of European projects. Italian groups are participating in these projects in close cooperation with industrial and academic partners of different countries. Among these programs probably the best known is the ESPRIT project which is now at the beginning of its second phase. All the aspects of speech and natural language processing have been addressed from speech analysis and synthesis to speech recognitionsystem assessment; some of the most relevant results will be presented along with some proposals for perspective research. Another European EUREKA project in which Italian groups are involved is PROMETHEUS an acronym for PROgraM for a European Traffic with Highest Efficiency and Unprecedented Safety where processing of noisy speech speaker independence and dialogue systems are the main topics in the man‐machine communication are