Conclusion of speech technology
Answers
Speech recognition is a thriving domain with many important applications. It's easy to predict that speech recognition research will continue as well as important practical applications will be created. Accurate speech recognition is not so hard problem so it should be solved in a foreseeable future. And it's not about AI because it's obvious that most of the speech recognition issues are not caused by the lack of understanding but rather a lack of good algorithms.
Noises, accents and so on are just purely technical problems which will be eventually solved. Researches often consider speech recognition in a noisy environment as a standalone problem with a practical goal to build an application that works. At the same time our knowledge about speech fundamentally imporves from day to day and the goals are more and more ambitious. Recent BABEL programs aims to improve support for non-English languages for example and it's planned that we will have quite good step forward in a next few years. Some leading researchers are working on language-independent speech recognition. The accuracy on the standard test sets also improves from year to year. And voice applications are already in every smartphone.
Like computers started to play chess better than human speech recognition soon will be done better by computers too. Importantly, that will add some important knowledge about nature as a whole and human brain in particular. So speech recognition is an important step to our exploration of the nature laws.