Next week is the speech nerd-fest known as SpeechTEK, taking place in DC. I’m really excited about how speech has taken off an d is now becoming a mainstream user interface.

Some things I’ll be keeping an eye out for:

• What are some new applications of voice?
• What new technologies in voice are coming out over the next year?
• What critical milestones will speech recognition hit over the coming year?

Last year at SpeechTEK, I mentioned that a trained ASR would surpass human performance before this year’s conference. It happened within six months. Thinking about what other predictions to make…