The competence network COAST is concerned with research and development in the field of speech recognition and speech interpretation with large lexicons for professional applications. The main research problems are:
The establishment of COAST is a significant contribution to the strengthening of Austria‘s position in research and industrial applications of speech technology. Bringing together different disciplines – speech recognition, signal processing, and semantic interpretation – allows to address limitations of traditional statistical speech recognition; limitations which are currently hindering a broad, comprehensive application of speech recognition in audio/media mining, information input, and professional document creation. COAST is organized as an association (“Verein”) whose members are the industrial and scientific partners, i.e., Philips Speech Recognition Systems Vienna, Sail Labs Technologies Vienna, SPSC Lab, the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence OFAI, NOA Audio Solutions Vienna, FH Technikum Vienna, Zydacron Graz, PCS Villach, and ebit Linz. The SPSC Lab has taken the scientific leadership in the COAST association. In 2009, Philips Speech Recognition Systems was acquired by the globally acting Nuance Communications USA, but still the research program will be completed as originally planned.