**1. Introduction**

This chapter is a retrospective of a very special moment for speech and dialog technologies. Since the end of the last century, the use of speech and dialog technologies has been limited by proprietary implementation of platforms with strong legacies, as well as limitations on the rapid adoption of the core technology advances. But at the turn of the century, a sudden change occurred, and speech applications started to be deployed in many commercial applications, becoming ubiquitous in a matter of years. That trend has continued to this day. This transformation was catalyzed by the creation and adoption of a family of standard languages. This evolution was quickly accepted and adopted by the industry, even before these languages were completely defined. In the meantime, research was constantly increasing performance, which also fueled the widespread deployment of speech applications.

In the early 2000s, a sharp increase in the number of speech applications occurred in many areas, including customer care, finance, travel, and many other sectors. This increase is continuing, with the diffusion of virtual assistants, automatic chatbots, speech presence in smartphones, in the car, and at home. Speaking to an appliance is now an everyday activity, while it was a dream limited to sci-fi movies only a few decades earlier. That dream is a reality today and industrial standards have played a significant role in this achievement.

The ecosystem created by speech standards has been active for more than 20 years, and it is in the core of the major players, even though there are recent trends to move from in-house technologies to hosting and to access speech resources by Web APIs. In these new developments, speech standards can still play a role to provide customizations to hosted resources.

The success of this enterprise was made possible by a highly collaborative work among a large group of people, from academia to industries and even individual contributors. The hope is that this example will inspire new developments in the future, and research and industry will be ready to create a new open ecosystem.
