![]() ![]() When I joined IBM, what was state-of-the-art is weaker than the iPhone you use today." But for many engineering things where you had to search and space words and do modelling, they helped. "For scientific work, the human brain was actually designed better than our computers. "It was very clear that to move the things from science to engineering, we needed the computers," Nahamoo said. ![]() The period also marked the first use of sophisticated computer algorithms, which helped better accommodate multiple speakers, include semantic information and reference a growing database of vocabulary. They drove the industrial institution as well as universities to help scientists innovate." But government had the need to be able to process massive amounts of spoken content in different form and fashion to be able to extract insight from it. The difference between government and industry was that the industry from a business perspective was not under pressure to replace the GUI - graphical user interface. "DARPA was actively funding it from the early days, and its sister organisations in government naturally had their own reasons for their interest. "A lot of the interest in speech recognition was driven by DARPA," Nahamoo said of the US Department of Defense's research arm. Scientists developed various techniques to improve recognition, including template-based isolated word recognition, dynamic time warping and continuous speech recognition through dynamic phoneme tracking. Human discovery was very slow."īy the late 1960s and 1970s, modern computers had emerged as a way to automatically process signals, and a number of major research organisations tasked themselves with furthering speech recognition technology, including IBM, Bell, NEC, the US Department of Defense and Carnegie Mellon University. ![]() The characteristics - the specifics that would give away a sound or word - had to be discovered automatically. This was extremely slow because the discovery of those characteristics by a human brain was taking a long time. Based on that, a reverse process could be done. "To build anything, a person had to sit down, look at a visual representation of a signal that was spoken for a given word, and find some characteristics - a signature - to then write a program to recognise them. "The limitation was essentially man in the loop," Nahamoo said. And Thomas Martin of RCA Laboratories developed several solutions to detect the beginnings and endpoints of speech, boosting accuracy. The following year, NEC Laboratories developed a hardware digit recogniser. In 1962, Jouji Suzuki and Kazuo Nakata of the Radio Research Lab in Tokyo, Japan, built a hardware vowel recogniser while Toshiyuki Sakai and Shuji Doshita at Kyoto University built a hardware phoneme recogniser - the first use of a speech segmented for analysis. In 1961, IBM researchers developed the "Shoebox", a device that recognised single digits and 16 spoken words. In 1959, James and Carma Forgie of MIT Lincoln Lab developed a 10-vowel system that was speaker-independent the same year, University College researchers Dennis Fry and Peter Denes focused on developing a recogniser for words consisting of two or more phonemes - the first use of statistical syntax at the phoneme level in speech recognition.ĭevelopment of analog systems based on spectral resonances accelerated in the 1960s. In 1956, Harry Olson and Herbert Belar of RCA Laboratories developed a machine that recognised 10 syllables of a single talker. "Some people point to things a hundred years old that could touch on speech technologies today."Īdvancements quickly followed. "Historically, there is evidence that mankind has been very interested in automation of interfacing with the world around us," said David Nahamoo, IBM fellow and the company's chief technical officer for speech. Much like its digital successors, the system estimated utterances (eg, the word "nine") by measuring their frequencies and comparing them to a reference pattern for each digit to guess the most appropriate answer. Balashek devised a system to recognise isolated digits spoken by a single person. (Most modern algorithms for speech recognition are still based on this concept.)īut it wasn't until 1952 that Bell Laboratories researchers developed a system to actually recognise, rather than reproduce or imitate, speech. It built on years of research conducted by his colleague Harvey Fletcher, a physicist whose work in the transmission and reproduction of sound firmly established the relationship between the energy of speech within a frequency spectrum and the result as perceived by a human listener. The year prior, Dudley received a patent for his Voder speech synthesiser, a valve-driven machine that modelled the human voice with the help of a human operator manipulating various controls. ![]()
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