♪ (Music fades in) ♪
(Chirping)
(Vocalizations, different languages)
(Talking overlaps in background)
(Computerized beeping)
(Man) We come into this world with the innate ability to learn to interact
with other sentient beings.
(Child vocalizing)
(Man) Suppose you are to interact with other people by writing little messages.
(Man) It'd be a real pain.
(Man) And that's how we interact with computers.
It's much easier just to talk to them... just so much easier...
(Man) If the computers could understand what we're saying.
For that, you need really good speech recognition.
(Narrator) The first speech recognition system was developed by Bell Laboratories
(Narrator) in 1952. It could only recognize numbers spoken by one person.
(Narrator) In the 1970s, Carnegie-Mellon came out with the Harpy System.
(Narrator) This was able to recognize over 1,000 words and different pronunciations
(Narrator) of the same word. - (Man) Tomato - (Woman) Tomato
(Narrator) Speech recognition continued in the 80s with the introduction of the
(Narrator) Hidden Markov Model, which used a more mathematical approach
(Narrator) to analyzing sound waves that led to many breakthroughs we have today.
You're taking in very raw audio wave forms
like you get through a microphone