![]() ![]() In 1997, Dragon released “Naturally Speaking,” which allowed for natural speech to be processed without the need for pauses. Three short years after Julie, the world was introduced to Dragon, debuting its first speech recognition system, the “Dragon Dictate”.Īround the same time, AT&T was playing with over-the-phone speech recognition software to help field their customer service calls. So, if you were speaking to a system that had trouble recognizing a word you said, it would be able to give an educated guess by assessing its options against correct syntactic, semantic, and tonal rules. Instead of just using sounds, scientists turned to algorithms to program systems with the rules of the English language. Instead, they moved more towards natural language processing (NLP). Scientists started abandoning the notion that speech recognition had to be purely acoustically based. The ability to distinguish between speakers was not the only advancement made during this time. In an impressive (if not downright terrifying) display, Julie was able to respond to a speaker and had the capacity to distinguish between speaker’s voices. In 1987, the World of Wonders “ Julie” doll came out. The speech chip within would prove to be an important tool for the next phase in speech recognition software. In 1978, the Speak & Spell, using a speech chip, was introduced to help children spell out words. In the late 1970s and 1980s, speech recognition systems started to become so ubiquitous that they were making their way into children’s toys. One of the more prominent inventions to come from this research program was called “Harpy”, a system that was able to recognize over 1000 words-the vocabulary of an average toddler. So, they invested five years into DARPA’s Speech Understanding Research program-one of the largest programs of its kind in the history of speech recognition. The ability for a computer to process natural human language could prove invaluable in any number of areas in the military and national defense. In the early 1970s, the Department of Defense began to recognize the value of speech recognition technology. However, users had to make pauses and speak slowly to ensure the machine would pick up what was being said. The technology was, at the time, quite advanced for what it was. Then, the system would try to match the sound as closely as it could to the preprogrammed tonal information it had. IBM engineers programmed the machines to use the sound and pitch of each phoneme as a clue to determine what word was being said. The earlier systems were set up to recognize and process bits of sound (phonemes). Up to this point, speech recognition was still laborious. Premiering at the World’s Fair in 1962, IBM’s Shoebox was able to recognize and differentiate between 16 words. The next real advancement took another 12 years to develop. Its purpose was meant to be helping toll operators to take more phone calls over the wire, but its high cost and inability to recognize a wide array of voices made it impractical. The first official example of our modern speech recognition technology was “ Audrey”, a system designed by Bell Laboratories in the 1950s.Īudrey, which occupied an entire room, was able to recognize only 9 digits (numbers 1-9) spoken by its developer, but it did so with an impressive 90% accuracy. The ability to talk to your devices have expanded to encompass most of the technology that we use in our daily lives, and its success is built largely on data collection.Īs we stand at the precipice of a world soon to be dominated by talking devices – and potentially, technologies with a consciousness – let’s take a look back at how it all started. It’s a slightly ironic development, seeing as texting and typing had become the preferred method of communication over voice calls just a few short years ago. ![]() Speech technology is being used to replace other, more ‘tired’ methods of input like typing, texting, and clicking. It uses natural language as input to trigger an action, enabling our devices to respond to our spoken commands. ![]() Speech recognition software enables phones, computers, tablets, and other machines to receive, recognize, and understand human utterances. Data collection will do the heavy lifting when it comes to the future of speech recognition software.
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