HISTORY OF VOICE TECHNOLOGY

Although the largest strides in the development oI voice recognition technology have occurred in
the past two decades, this technology really began with Alexander Graham Bell's inventions in
the 1870s. By discovering how to convert air pressure waves (sound) into electrical impulses, he
began the process oI uncovering the scientiIic and mathematical basis oI understanding speech.
In the 1950s, Bell Laboratories developed the Iirst eIIective speech recognizer Ior numbers. In
the 1970s, the ARPA Speech Understanding Research project developed the technology Iurther -
in particular by recognizing that the objective oI automatic speech recognition is the
understanding oI speech not merely the recognition oI words.
By the 1980s, two distinct types oI commercial products were available. The Iirst oIIered
speaker-independent recognition oI small vocabularies. It was most useIul Ior telephone
transaction processing. The second, oIIered by Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Dragon Systems,
and IBM, Iocused on the development oI large-vocabulary voice recognition systems so that text
documents could be created by voice dictation.
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