honored. Amy’s work has always been infused with c- ative intensity, so I knew the book would be as interesting for established speech professionals as for readers new to the speech-processing industry. The fact that I would be writing the foreward with Bill Scholz made the job even more enjoyable. Bill and I have known each other since he was at UNISYS directing projects that had a profound impact on speech-recognition tools and applications. Bill Scholz The opportunity to prepare this foreword with Judith provides me with a rare oppor- nity to collaborate with a seasoned speech professional to identify numerous signi- cant contributions to the field offered by the contributors whom Amy has recruited. Judith and I have had our eyes opened by the ideas and analyses offered by this collection of authors. Speech recognition no longer needs be relegated to the ca- gory of an experimental future technology; it is here today with sufficient capability to address the most challenging of tasks. And the point-click-type approach to GUI control is no longer sufficient, especially in the context of limitations of mode- day hand held devices. Instead, VUI and GUI are being integrated into unified multimodal solutions that are maturing into the fundamental paradigm for comput- human interaction in the future.

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