As cellphones become ever more popular, and computational costs continue to fall, the prospect of ASR over wireless networks is attractive. So too is the use of ASR over the Internet (VoIP). The book describes the current state of understanding of both these ideas.



A common configuration is for the speech to be captured and digitised on a client machine [eg. cellphone], and the signal then sent over a network to a server on which runs the ASR. Several speech recognition standards have arisen over the years, to quantify the digitising and the ASR effectiveness.



For the ASR, Hidden Markov Models appear to be commonly used. The efficacy is described.



Maybe the most advanced topic is speech to speech translation, via handheld devices. Seriously difficult. Not only are there the problems of ASR accuracy for the input speech, but then the well known problems of Machine Translation of that to text in another language.