Biographical Information

Articles by Nelson Morgan

What's New in Government-sponsored Speech Recognition Research

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has been applied to many commercial tasks, including dictation, command and control, and a range of telephone-based services. Current ASR technology resulted from 50 years of research, both industrial and academic-not all of it initially aimed at speech processing. For instance, the Hidden Markov Model statistical approach was originally proposed in government-sponsored cryptography research in the 1960's. Programs to explicitly support speech recognition were then established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the same organization that funded the original development of the Internet. However, in the late '90's DARPA speech research funding declined. It was common to hear a few years ago that the speech recognition problem was essentially "solved". This may have been due to exaggerated claims that encouraged the view that a "Star Trek" level of performance was right around the corner.