Brief history and evolution of ASR technology
The concepts behind automated speech recognition date back to the 1930s, when Bell Laboratories built machines to recognize digits spoken over the telephone. However, widespread commercial adoption of the technology we know today only occurred in the 1990s and 2000s.
After nearly a century of innovation, speech recognition capabilities have advanced enormously thanks to transformative approaches in machine learning and the availability of big data. The accuracy and versatility of ASR continue to progress at a remarkable pace.
The early days – Pattern recognition approaches
The first significant wave of innovation in ASR came during the 1950s at Bell Laboratories. Researchers focused on isolated word recognition using heuristic techniques to match acoustic patterns by examining audio waveforms and identifying distinguishable speech components.
Bell Labs built specialized machines to interpret spoken digit sequences over...
