Communications of the ACM
A Historical Perspective of Speech Recognition
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With the introduction of Apple's Siri and similar voice search services from Google and Microsoft, it is natural to wonder why it has taken so long for voice recognition technology to advance to this level. Also, we wonder, when can we expect to hear a more human-level performance? In 1976, one of the authors (Reddy) wrote a comprehensive review of the state of the art of voice recognition at that time. A non-expert in the field may benefit from reading the original article.34 Here, we provide our collective historical perspective on the advances in the field of speech recognition. Given the space limitations, this article will not attempt a comprehensive technical review, but limit the scope to discussing the missing science of speech recognition 40 years ago and what advances seem to have contributed to overcoming some of the most thorny problems.
Key Insights
Speech recognition had been a staple of science fiction for years, but in 1976 the real-world capabilities bore little resemblance to the far-fetched capabilities in the fictional realm. Nonetheless, Reddy boldly predicted it would be possible to build a $20,000 connected speech system within the next 10 years. Although it took longer than projected, not only were the goals eventually met, but the system costs were much less and have continued to drop dramatically. Today, in many smartphones, the industry delivers free speech recognition that significantly exceeds Reddy's speculations. In most fields the imagination of science fiction writers far exceeds reality. Speech recognition is one of the few exceptions. Moreover, speech recognition is unique not just because of its successes: in spite of all the accomplishments, additional challenges remain that are as daunting as those that have been overcome to date.
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