The language industry showcase attracted a wide range of companies involved in language training, language translation and language technology. Given my background in technology, I was particularly interested in one of the more technical sessions, that was focused on Speech processing technology and its applications (which draws on issues from computing science, linguistics and engineering). While most people know that speech recognition technology is used by many companies over the phone for customer service applications, I was surprised to find out that it is even being used to produce the closed-captions that we see on Canadian hockey broadcasts. Each of the speakers also gave the audience some insight into what we might expect to see in the not too distant future in terms of "emotion detection" (is this an angry customer or a happy customer), or "voice transformation" (can a phone modify your voice to sound like someone else's voice), or even "identity verification" (can your bank use your "voiceprint" to help confirm your identity over the phone, over the internet or in person).
