Abstract: This is the main part of an article read by the author at the L. M. Ericsson prize awarding ceremony, 1985 and also in Beijing during his visit in Sept.-Oct. the same year. To analyse the present situation and the future development of speech technology in detail is one of its particularities. It emphasizes on speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition applied to a speech based information system.
It is pointed out that speech research is a remarkable exciting venture, speech technology has an optimistic future but we are confronted with the reefs of the knowledge barrier. A small child can do what a thousand scientists do not quite understand.