This paper contains some personal observations of the author, not necessarily shared by the Commission of the European Communities, derived from work done in a number of Speech Technology R&D projects supported by the Communities ESPRIT programme. The observations are translated into suggestions for future R&D in Europe. It is suggested that the future work should be more coordinated and intensified, and that much more emphasis is given to fundamental research in linguistics as a support for language-related technological R&D in general. A long term broad European project may be needed to give orientation to the dispersed R&D activities. But the R&D community, in particular the IT manufacturers and the IT service industry should also be pushed to develop speech products for which the technology and the market may exist tomorrow or even today.