Readings in Speech Recognition

Rating:
Summary: How Far Speech Recognition Has Come
Review: Written in 1990, the book shows the vast constrast between what was practical in the field of speech recognition then, and what is achievable now.

In 1990, most speech recognition was of single words, not continuous speech, and it was of a given speaker. That is, it was not speaker independent. Plus, due to the limited memory and slow cpus, often the analysis was not in anything approaching realtime. Typically, the speaker would say something, word by word, and this would be recorded in digital form, which would then be analysed.

Even with these hardware limitations, the papers describe promising approaches and indeed of good progress in the subject. Which is actually what did happen subsequently.

As an aside, Kai-Fu Lee came to prominence at Carnegie Mellon in the late 80s, writing key parts of the Sphinx speech recognition system, which was highly regarded as the benchmark of its time.