Speech is a highly complex varying signal comprising many parameters. In essence, behind the "magic" of speech recognition, lies generations of researchers contributing to decades of slow, continuous progress copious government funding and great leadership.
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The quick answer is that it’s a long answer, but one that we’ll keep brief for this blog. How did this science fiction fantasy of only a few decades ago come true? As we saw earlier, however, they did get speech recognition right.
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The Star Trek story, for example, nominally takes place in the 23rd century and posits many advanced technologies, yet its crew are still using clipboards and have no seatbelts. One of the weird things about predicting the future is how uneven our predictions can be. Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1969. Here’s a typical clip from Star Trek showing the voice interface on-board the USS Enterprise:ĭeactivation of the HAL 9000 computer. The voice of the computer itself, by the way, was voiced by Majel Roddenberry, wife of Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator.
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To look at two examples, the classic television show Star Trek, which shaped the ambitions and hopes of generations of budding engineers and scientists, often featured the voice of the main ship’s computer fluidly interacting with the crew. Their visions of the future often assumed that one day we would interact with our machines by speaking to them. In the ancient folk tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the door to the cave of hidden loot is opened by uttering the phrase, “Open Sesame!” -making it possibly the world’s earliest voice-activated device! In the twentieth century, science fiction authors in particular have written about machines and sentient beings that could understand and react to human speech. A History of Automatic Speech RecognitionĪcross the generations, people have dreamed of speaking to machines or spirits to gain knowledge or carry out tasks and commands.