Statistical speech recognition
Jelinek set out the full statistical scheme: an acoustic model, a language model, and a search for the most likely sentence given the signal.
Why it matters
Recognition stopped being a problem of phonetics and became one of estimating probabilities, the frame still in use.
The scheme separates the probability of the acoustics given the words from the prior probability of the words themselves, the language model. The IBM group hired no phoneticians and wrote no pronunciation rules: everything was estimated from data. Twelve years later the same group carried the apparatus over to machine translation. Modern systems changed the components but kept the search for the most likely sequence.