About the Centre for Speech Technology CTT (Centre for Speech Technology) is a platform for cooperation between Swedish companies, non-commercial organizations and academic research within the strategically important area of speech technology. Look at the video! Also take a look at this video about competence centres. CTT was established in April 1996 as a long-term enterprise. The vision which CTT strives to attain is the speech-based device with which the user can discuss and solve concrete problems by means of spoken dialogue, the natural means of human communication. One of the CTT´s concrete goals is to develop, test and experiment system prototypes for dialogue and database management using spoken interaction. The results of the different research areas are integrated and tested within these prototypes. Concentrated efforts on critical component problems of cutting-edge technological nature are combined with broad competence development within all key areas of speech technology. The most important purpose of CTT is to constitute a stable base for the collective effort required for an advanced Swedish industrial exploitation within the area of speech technology with particular emphasis on the Swedish language. CTT is a unit within the Department of Speech, Music and Hearing (TMH). A report of the CTT activities for the first 10 years can be found here. This period was supported by VINNOVA, KTH, and in total 34 Swedish companies and non-commercial organizations. The activities of the centre consist of both short-term, problem-related projects together with its partners and long-term strategic projects of industrial relevance. The strategy of CTT may be summarised in the following points: long-term research projects project cooperation with CTT partners participation of CTT personnel in international projects research exchange with leading foreign groups graduate-level research training spreading of competence through the exchange of researchers within Sweden and collaboration with other Swedish research groups special information dissemination efforts. Research areas given priority in terms of a long-term scientific and industrial perspective are: Speech technology in interactive dialogue systems Language models for spoken language, including dialogue management Methods for automatic speech recognition Principles of speaker characterisation The 2003 activity report, in Swedish, can be downloaded here (pdf).