NETtalk
The network learned to read English text aloud, starting from babble and reaching intelligible speech after one night of training.
Why it matters
For the first time the result of training a network could simply be listened to, and that made connectionism legible outside the laboratory.
The input is a seven-letter window, the output a phoneme; the network had one hidden layer. Trained on a thousand words it pronounced correctly ones it had not seen. A recording of training, where babble gradually becomes speech, was shown on the news and in lectures. Analysis of the hidden layer found the network had separated vowels from consonants by itself, though nobody had specified that.