voice recognition history

By Connor Berna

  • 1950s baby talk

    1950s baby talk
    In the 1950s through the 1960s, the first systems could only understand digits.

  • 1951 baby talk

    (Given the complexity of human language, it makes a sense that inventors and engineers first focused on numbers.

  • 1952 baby talk

    1952 baby talk
    The bell laboratories designed in 1952 the "Audrey" system which recognized digits spoken by a single voice.

  • 1953 baby talk

    Ten years later, IBM demonstrated at the 1962 World's fair "shoebox" machine, which could understand 16 words spoken in English.

  • 1970s speech recognition takes off

    Speech recognition technology made major strides in the 1970s, thanks to interest and funding from the U.S. Department of defense.

  • 1971 speech recognition takes off

    Harpy was significant because it introduced a more efficient search approach, called beam search, to "prove the finite-state network of possible sentences," according to Readings in Speech Recognition by Alex Waibel and Kai-Fu Lee. (The story of speech recognition is very much tied to advances in search methodology and technology, as Google's entrance into speech recognition on mobile devices proved just a few years ago.)

  • 1972 speech recognition takes off

    “The '70s also marked a few other important milestones in speech recognition technology, including the founding of the first commercial speech recognition company, Threshold Technology, as well as Bell Laboratories' introduction of a system that could interpret multiple people's voices.

  • 1980s: Speech recognition turns toward prediction.

    1980s: Speech recognition turns toward prediction.
    “Over the next decade, thanks to new approaches to understanding what people say, speech recognition vocabulary jumped from about a few hundred words to several thousand words, and had the potential to recognize an unlimited number of words. One major reason was a new statistical method known as the hidden Markov model.

  • 1981s: Speech recognition turns toward prediction.

    1981s: Speech recognition turns toward prediction.
    “Rather than simply using templates for words and looking for sound patterns, HMM considered the probability of unknown sounds' being words. This foundation would be in place for the next two decades (seeAutomatic Speech Recognition—A Brief History of the Technology Development by B.H. Juang and Lawrence R. Rabiner).