  Recent speech and audio coding standards such as 3GPP Enhanced Voice Services
match the foreseeable needs and requirements in transmission of speech and
audio, when using current transmission infrastructure and applications. Trends
in Internet-of-Things technology and development in personal digital assistants
(PDAs) however begs us to consider future requirements for speech and audio
codecs. The opportunities and challenges are here summarized in three concepts:
collaboration, unification and privacy. First, an increasing number of devices
will in the future be speech-operated, whereby the ability to focus voice
commands to a specific devices becomes essential. We therefore need methods
which allows collaboration between devices, such that ambiguities can be
resolved. Second, such collaboration can be achieved with a unified and
standardized communication protocol between voice-operated devices. To achieve
such collaboration protocols, we need to develop distributed speech coding
technology for ad-hoc IoT networks. Finally however, collaboration will
increase the demand for privacy protection in speech interfaces and it is
therefore likely that technologies for supporting privacy and generating trust
will be in high demand.
