About Us

Speech + Mobility is a research group of the Media Laboratory at M.I.T. We are about communication and mobility. We try to use tools such as context - location, activity, social situation - and personal history to mediate interaction with others at a distance. New ways of using emerging technology, particularly wireless networking, can increase the intimacy and effectiveness of relationships over a distance, in ways that are more subtle than, for example, ringing the telephone.

To make sense out of context, we have to learn individual habits. Recognizing that sharing such personal information raises privacy concerns, we emphasize personal and family or care-giving relationships over workgroups, as privacy becomes more social or personal, and less legal or political in such situations. User interfaces are critical to blend the interaction with the distant other and whatever activity and people with whom one is currently engaged.

Speech is the natural communication channel, and our work with speech has strong roots in many years of research in better exploiting speech as a data type and exploring audio browsing techniques. Speech also was the reason for a long affiliation with telecommunications, including early unified messaging and conversational message management systems. For many years, the ubiquitous voice telephone network has allowed for means of interacting with computers while away from one's desk. Speech is a very rich but challenging medium, and user interfaces to and computer processing of recorded speech increase the value of stored digital audio.

Speech + Mobility was formerly known as Speech Interfaces (you can find our old website here), and in addition to being a founding group at the Media Lab, traces its origins back to the Architecture Machine Group in the late 1970s.