Issues relating to automatic speech recognition (ASR) are discussed with respect to applications in the telecommunications area in the near future. As a preliminary, we introduce an interesting discussion from a past conference in Japan about what is hindering the spread of ASR. Then, some relatively new robustness issues in telephone-based ASR applications are discussed. These include accurate voice/noise discrimination, and multiple microphones, utterance verification/rejection for flexible vocabulary systems, breath noise and hand noise, instantaneous adaptation to environmental noise, a spelling method for Japanese Kanji texts, dialog control issues, distransparency of ASR systems, children's voices, HMM training with localized data, adaptive dialog strategy.