Like in the 1985 comic science fiction film "Back to the Future", the participants of the 2014 ITG Fachtagung Sprachkommunikation will be sent back in time by 30 years. In a smooth passage through the space-time continuum they will find out how the future of digital speech processing and its applications was shaped in the past.
The feasibility of the early concepts of speech coding, echo cancellation and noise reduction was proven with elaborate but bulky multi-DSP systems. These pioneering exercises were groundwork for the forthcoming digital mobile radio system GSM.
Moore’s law of the exponential growth of the processing speed and the memory capacity was expected to be still valid for many years. Thus, the engineers were keen to invent more and more complex combinations of sophisticated signal processing and coding algorithms for incredible appliances as multi-microphone mobile phones, distributed wireless microphone arrays, binaural conferencing equipment or smart phone assisted hearing aids. The vision of smart devices such as Kinect or Google Glass for interaction and gaming with computers by voice and gestures became reality and opened further amazing perspectives.