Layering on contextual information - like where your next meeting is, or what restaurants you’ve liked in the past - will help the speech-driven systems get smarter.

Apple’s Siri personal assistant, introduced in 2011 and built with technology from Nuance, “raised the level of attention around speech interfaces in a big way,” says Mike Phillips, a serial entrepreneur in the speech industry.īut plenty of people have mocked Siri’s shortcomings. What’s everyone working on now? Dan Miller of Opus Research says “the holy grail” is a personal assistant that recognizes you quickly, understands your preferences, your privileges, and where you are. Many of the smaller firms were eventually acquired by Nuance, a publicly traded company in Burlington it sells speech-recognition software to customers like Apple, Amazon, and BMW, and offers its own products like the Dragon Mobile Assistant In the 1970s, Markhoul recalls, “It took an hour using a mainframe from Digital Equipment to recognize one sentence.” And that system only recognized 1,000 words.Īll that academic and military-funded research spawned companies like Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Dragon Systems, SpeechWorks, and Wildfire Communications, which brought speech recognition to personal computers and telephone call centers. Much of BBN’s funding came from the Department of Defense’s advanced research arm. Wrote a doctoral thesis on speech recognition at MIT in the 1960s, and then went to work at BBN in 1970 at the age of 28. Labs at MIT and research at places like BBN Technologies, now part of Raytheon, have chiseled away at the incredibly difficult problems of recognizing the words you’re speaking, and trying to intuit what you mean by them.

There has been “a quiet building” over the past four decades or so, in the words of Peter Mahoney, Nuance’s chief marketing officer. Hazen’s name was “TJ Hayes and,” and it also interpreted earpieces as “your pieces.”)Ĭambridge isn’t suddenly a nexus of speech activity. (OK: I stopped dictating toward the end of that last paragraph, because speech recognition is still utterly at sea when it comes to proper names.

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