THE VOICE IN THE MACHINE

Some of you may remember the Apple’s knowledge navigator video posted here. It was released in 1987 as a vision of a future tight integration of advanced technologies on a flat tablet computer. The computer in this entertaining vision clip sports a fancy Web-like interface, a realistic avatar, touch screen with gesture recognition, teleconferencing, speech recognition, natural language understanding, all of that  from 5 to 15 years before they were actually available in some shape or form. I remember watching this during my first years at Bell Labs when the recognition of connected digits was still one of the main challenges, a vocabulary of 1,000 words was considered a large one (a million word vocabulary does not scare anyone in speech recognition today), and all we had for training speech recognizer was a few thousand utterances (today we talk about 100s of millions of utterances).