What are some of the key factors that are making speech systems more widely available?
Kurzweil Applied Intelligent Systems was founded in 1982, with the goal of creating a voice-activated word processor. The grail has been very large vocabulary, speaker independence, and continuous speech. One thing that makes it possible today is Moore’s Law. It’s only been in the last six months that we’ve had PCs that can support the processing requirements of continuous speech. The next step now is to integrate natural-language understanding with continuous speech dictation. People don’t want to say “open file” and “close file.” They want to say, “Get me the current letter to engineering.” It’s awkward to go back and forth between different modalities. Q: How did you first get involved in speech-recognition technology? A: I started with an interest in pattern recognition, which was the science project that I developed to win the Westinghouse Science Award as a high school student. From there, I moved into optical character recognition. That was a solution in search of a problem. Tha
