Speech recognition has been challenging scientists for decades, but has continued to keep them motivated as its potential is enormous for both use and earnings.
Though speech recognition had fallen off the map in terms of popular discussion, is has been hauled back into the spotlight once more along with the release of the latest Apple product, the iPhone 4S, which includes speech recognition among its features.
It has left many people wondering whether this feature will remain a fun little gimmick, or whether it will become an essential way for humans to communicate with their computers and other devices.
In its earliest years, the speech recognition industry was frequently geared toward doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who don’t have a lot of free time and who are not entirely comfortable with keyboard use.
These professionals were often offered products that came with a high price tag, but only rather rudimentary functions and abilities. Primarily, they would allow the user to dictate length legal submissions or medical notes, for example, into a microphone hooked up to a device that would convert their spoken words into text.
Typically speaking, the outcome of these machines would also require significant reviewing, editing, and proofing in order to turn them into recognizable and proper English documents.
More recently, this technology has started to become much more affordable and therefore more available to a wider group of people – for example, mobile phone users. Though Google has been a pioneer in this effort for some time now, it is the Siri voice feature in the iPhone 4S that has truly attracted the attention of the world.
