Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 9.
A spectrogram of a male human voice saying “Two plus seven is less than ten”
(Courtesy of Victor Zue)
from a lamp, through a rotating disk, and then through a spectrogram
pattern, into photo-electric cells. The amount of light at each frequency
band corresponded to the amount of acoustic energy at that band, so by
converting the light energy impinging onto the photo-electric cells into
sound energy, the original speech sounds could be heard.
Speech Recognition
How often, on waking of a cold morning, we have wished for a
robot we could command to shut the bedroom window. To design
a machine that could “hear” and “understand” speech is certainly
an old dream of mankind. In our age of technology we can think
of myriads of ways to put such a machine to work—from printing
a dictated speech to answering the telephone or operating a factory
on spoken commands. [6]
Thus began a 1955 article in
Scientific American
by Edward David de-
scribing the world's first speech recognition machine. It was designed by
Stephen Balashek and Keith Davis at Bell Telephone Laboratories and
was called Audrey.
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This machine was intended to facilitate voice dial-
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For Automatic Digit Recognizer.
