First, characterize the raw sound by a minimal set of numbers then, match those numbers against a template - e.g., this sound is a 'p' because numerically it looks like a prerecorded 'p'. What the ARPA-funded research demonstrated, though, was that you could make more significant practical progress by doing something much more crude. How can the computer work out whether a vowel is 'ah' or 'ee', whether a consonant is 'p' or 't', or even where the phoneme boundaries are? Most researchers expected that computers would find the features of speech, corresponding to how the mouth produced the sounds: 'this is a voiced guttural stop, that is a rounded front vowel'. The major obstacle was the acoustic model, which may be imagined as phonemic analysis. (I once proposed the term 'autoglossomerolysis,' but somehow it didn't catch on.) In the early 1970s, ARPA threw massive amounts of funding at the problem.

Another ARPA project was to have computers know what people were saying - called 'speech recognition'. Department of Defense during the Cold War you're certainly familiar with one of its creations, the Internet.

Wreck a Nice Beach - You've probably heard of ARPA, the advanced research wing of the U.S.

Where is HAL 9000? The QWERTY keyboard is a clumsy dinosaur of course you'd eventually like your computer to read your thoughts, but in the meantime, why can't you just tell it what to do? Well, to a large extent, you can you wouldn't want to hand over control of a mission-critical task to a voice-driven computer just yet, but your computer need no longer be as deaf as a post either. On the other hand, by all accounts we should long ago have been talking to our computers. Increased brain power was an obvious prediction, but few foresaw that computers would also become small, cheap, and ubiquitous, with all the tremendous attendant sociological implications. Talk Is Cheap - ViaVoice Enhanced EditionĬlassic science fiction, by and large, has proven both myopic and optimistic when it comes to computers.

Viavoice millennium edition