Many science fiction writers and electrical engineers have envisioned that one day people will be able to talk to appliances. “Washing machine on” would be the vocal shot to be heard round the world liberating humanity from mechanical enslavement to buttons and knobs. However, although the current performance of speech recognition systems might be compared favorably to the effectiveness of commanding a dog to sit—a significant improvement from past decades when recognition performance was more like commanding a cat—talking to appliances is not the killer application that is desired by most people. But even at the current level of performance, there are a number of important successful applications for computer speech recognition systems. Moreover, understanding why computer speech perception has not reached the level of ...