William Meisel
The Lost History of "Talking to Computers": And What It Teaches Us About AI Exuberance
Book blurb...
Speech recognition ”using human language to connect with computers” is an area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that has caught people's imagination and challenged hundreds of companies to make it a reality.
This work documents 27 years of efforts by companies and the individuals driving them to connect us to computers using human language and to make a financial success of the effort. In some years, over 300 companies believed they could profitably deliver speech recognition technology or its applications. They faced the hurdle of the cost of computing power being much higher than it is today and had to compromise in early years on their objectives, finding applications that both served a need but could be delivered at an affordable price.
This history provides a perspective on how difficult technologies evolve more slowly than we remember, with much of that history and its lessons lost. The Lost History of "Talking to Computers" provides insights into today's exuberance over Artificial Intelligence.
