Historical Perspective of the Field of ASR/NLU

Abstract

The quest for a machine that can recognize and understand speech, from any speaker, and in any environment has been the holy grail of speech recognition research for more than 70 years. Although we have made great progress in understanding how speech is produced and analyzed, and although we have made enough advances to build and deploy in the field a number of viable speech recognition systems, we still remain far from the ultimate goal of a machine that communicates naturally with any human being. It is the goal of this section to document the history of research in speech recognition and natural language understanding, and to point out areas where great progress has been made, along with the challenges that remain to be solved in the future.