The ARPA Speech Understanding Research programme
The agency funded a five-year programme with a target: understand continuous speech over a thousand-word vocabulary at acceptable accuracy.
Why it matters
A state programme set speech recognition a measurable goal with a deadline for the first time, and created the habit of evaluated competition.
A study group chaired by Newell recommended bringing six levels of knowledge to bear: acoustic, parametric, phonemic, lexical, sentence and semantic. Carnegie Mellon, BBN, SRI and the System Development Corporation took part. The conditions were strict: continuous speech, several speakers, a restricted domain. That framing produced HEARSAY, DRAGON and HARPY.