Progress and prospects for spoken language technology: Results from five sexennial surveys

Every six years (since 1997), a survey has been conducted at the IEEE workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU). The aim has been to gain an insight into the research community's perspective on the 'progress and prospects' for spoken language technology. These surveys have been based on a set of 'statements' describing possible scenarios, and respondents are asked to estimate the year (in the future or in the past) when each given scenario might be realised. A number of the statements have appeared in multiple surveys, hence it has been possible to track changes in opinion over time. This paper presents the combined results from five such surveys, the most recent of which was conducted at ASRU-2021. The latest results reveal a dramatic increase in optimism.