25 Years In Speech Technology

…and I still don’t talk to my computer.

These are personal reflections and observations, some of which might seem opinionated or simply be mistaken. Feel free to comment, I probably won’t be offended.

While I was a post-grad at Cambridge in 1994, I was taught by Steve Young and Tony Robinson, who had created some of the best speech recognition systems in the world. However, the most important thing I learned in my first few days, was something I would never have guessed from seeing early versions of DragonDictate. They had already cracked it. A modestly powerful computer could convert…