250 - Speaker recognition in telephony. Chair: A. Paoloni, Italy

Spoken language systems technology has made rapid advances since the start of COST 209.

However, in spite of the considerable progress, speaker recognition is still the subject of research rather than being a mature market technology.
Interactive speech recognition systems, on the other hand, are starting to appear in many telephony applications such as banking, information services
and tele-shopping to name but a few. There is no doubt that speaker recognition technology does work – countless papers from many conferences around the world are testimony to this.

There is also no doubt that commercial organisations using telephony-based services have a requirement for security in their systems. Nevertheless, industrial take-up is still poor, if not largely non-existent.

The COST 250 Action was initiated in order to build up an understanding of the issues that affect speaker recognition technology, not only through algorithmic research but application development,technology assessment and market analysis.

Although the technology is still in its infancy, there is considerable interest in the field. A total of fourteen countries were actively involved in the Action. These were Greece, Denmark, France, United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey and Slovenia.