Speech Recognition

[joeqsmith]

Many years ago I had an opportunity to tour Bell Labs.  I had friends who worked at Western Electric and had toured parts of their facility as well.  One of the things I remember was seeing a speaker independent recognition system they were working on.   We took turns talking into the microphone and that system was very accurate. Their vision was to allow you to make hands free calls and one of the early applications was to automate the university enrollment over the phone.   Seeing that system work sparked an interest in the subject.  At one point I attempted to make my own system from scratch.   It somewhat works but is very crude.   Later in my career I was on a team working with one of the world leaders on recognition.  In the 90's I had a system from Dragon and an earlier unit that I no longer remember the name.   

Now it's mid 2021 and I have not thought about speech recognition in many years.   I was on a Teams conference the other day and noticed it had a recognition system so I enabled it.  I couldn't believe what I was seeing that Microsoft system do.  Multiple people talking fast and that thing was hardly missing a beat.   There's no way they pulled that out of their ass, so I did a little reading.  A familiar name came up.  Did they buy Dragon or just license the technology.   

What a difference from my home made system from my youth.

[Kerlin]

I remember the early days of speech recognition.
At the time I read in a technical journal that one bright spark, who was invited to seminar on it, walked in saw on a projector screen that the system was operational and the guests were welcome to try it.
He yelled out "Start, Run, CMD.exe, C, D, C, colon, back slash, enter, format C " and it worked.

[Cyberdragon]

I remember the early days of speech recognition.
At the time I read in a technical journal that one bright spark, who was invited to seminar on it, walked in saw on a projector screen that the system was operational and the guests were welcome to try it.
He yelled out "Start, Run, CMD.exe, C, D, C, colon, back slash, enter, format C " and it worked.

That mad lad, he basically ordered the computer to self destruct!

[james_s]

IIRC Windows won't let you format the system drive, although maybe there's a way to override that? I never tried *that* hard. It will work on Linux though, sudo rm -r is very dangerous, always, always make sure you are in the directory you intend to be in before using that command. 

[Kerlin]

I remember the early days of speech recognition.

IIRC Windows won't let you format the system drive, although maybe there's a way to override that? I never tried *that* hard.

Zero for reading comprehension.
Thats around 1998.

[Ed.Kloonk]