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A brief history of Innovation in Speech Recognition 

Speech Recognition is a technology that dates back to the early 50's when Bell Laboratory first developed the Audrey System. Audrey could recognize the first ten numbers in English via a comparison of signal processing to match "pre-defined" electrical patterns for each number. Other countries, including Japan, England, and the USSR began voice recognition research in the fifties and sixties. Speech recognition, like computers of that time, was primitive. Nevertheless, these first steps proved essential in future developments.

The 1970's saw a big push by the U.S. Government in promoting research in Speech Recognition technology. The Department of Defense backed five years of research in the mid 70's to develop a machine that was capable of understanding the basic level of vocabulary of a 3 year old child.

Perhaps the most important transition in voice recognition technology took place a decade later as computers obtained more computational power. The change from recognition to predictive voice detection was made possible by a statistical method called the Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Voice recognition changed from comparing words against a preset list, to predicting which words via Fourier analysis and statistical distribution coefficients. The Markov property states that stochastic processes are memoryless, thereby inferring information about the future and past states of the system. This premise is essential in analyzing signals generated by voice sounds.

The 1990's refined and better combined the technology and processing power to new levels. Voice recognition was now available to almost any end user with the advent of the personal computer. Industries across the spectrum began implementing speech-to-text/commands across a wide variety of areas as our blog will further explore. 

The present day revolution of speech recognition has arrived on the heels of cloud computing. Computations that would take minutes on a personal computer are done in fractions of a second on the cloud. We will explore the impact Speech Recognition Technology has had in industry and it's wide applications to new emerging fields. From it's infant state in the fifties, half a century later Speech Recognition is changing the way we interact and live with technology.