Pronunciation training for second language learning
ISLE (Interative Spoken Language Education) has a demo of software that uses speech recognition to help non-native speakers see how good their pronunciation is. I haven't tried it (it looks to be targeted toward Italian and German learners of English) but it's an idea I've wanted to see productized for a long time.
Once your SR system takes in a spoken audio file and analyzes it for statistical properties related to the way the engine was trained, you can do lots of cool stuff. Was the utterance spoken by a male? female? young person? angry person? How angry? How female?
I think this would be a wonderful way to learn a foreign language. Or maybe a midwestern English speaker like me could work on getting one of those pompouseloquent British accents that seem to be so appealing to the ladies. :-)
