Pioneering Speech Recognition

“‘[Frederick Jelinek] envisioned applying the mathematics of probability to the problem of processing speech and language,’ said Sanjeev Khudanpur, a Johns Hopkins associate professor of electrical and computer engineering who worked with Jelinek. ‘This revolutionized the field. Fifty years ago no one thought that was possible. Today, it’s the dominant paradigm.’”

“Fred Jelinek’s underlying insight was that you don’t have to do it like humans. It was almost a 180-degree turn in the established approaches to speech recognition, and it led to most of the success in the field in the last two decades.”

“We knew nothing of speech therapy but it seemed to us an excellent project for the social responsibility programs that we pursue as part of our mission. ... In this case, of course, we had to teach ourselves everything.”

“Now we’re reaching a state where it can be available to everyone. The IBM Personal Dictation System allows users to talk more quickly and more naturally than previous speech recognition systems. It will have a significant impact on personal computer.”

“The advances IBM has made in research and development of speech-to-speech translation systems have the potential to revolutionize the way people around the world communicate with one another.”

“The best way to make computers universally usable is to get them to communicate the way people do—by talking and listening. For instance, the revolutionary potential of the Internet will be fully realized once it harnesses the power of speech technology.”