At the end of the last century, the landscape of speech applications was abruptly changed due to the convergence of several factors: the maturity of speech technologies and the advent of standards and platforms.The talk will give a clear picture of the current status of technologies and platforms in use in today speech applications and highlights of the trends of evolution.

Speaker: Paolo Baggia, Director of International Standards, Loquendo

About the Speaker:Paolo Baggia is currently Director of International Standards of Loquendo and actively involved in W3C and the VoiceXML Forum, where he is a member of the Board of Directors. Formerly, he lead the VoiceXML browser development for Loquendo's VoxNauta platform. In 1989, he joined CSELT, Telecom Italia's R lab, and was involved in several research activities, including natural language, speech parsing, spoken dialog design, and language modeling. In 1999, he took part in a large-scale speech application: the automation of TreniItalia railway company's call centers. He holds a degree in computer science from the Università di Torino.