Session 14: New Directions/Applications

One of the highlights of the meeting was a presentation by Julie Payette, an astronaut for the Canadian Space Agency, who discussed the use of speech recognition in space travel. Some of the reasons why voice input and output are potentially valuable in space include the naturalness of the speech modality, the need to have hands and eyes available for performing applications tasks, and the overwhelming number of displays and controls to be interrogated and manipulated. The harsh environment of space and the severe consequences of failure demand that designers produce systems that are highly accurate, reliable, and robust.