<ul><li>Major breakthroughs dating back to the 18th century have provided the platform for the digital assistants we all know today.</li><li>The earliest advances in speech recognition focused mainly on the creation of vowel sounds, as the basis of a system that might also learn to interpret phonemes (the building blocks of speech) from nearby interlocutors.</li><li>Dictation machines, pioneered by Thomas Edison in the late 19th century, were capable of recording speech.</li><li>It was not until the 1950s that this line of inquiry would lead to genuine speech recognition.</li></ul>

The History of Speech Recognition Technology

First-party Hardware: Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Show, Fire TV Stick, Kindle.Digital Assistant: AlexaUsage Statistics:<ul><li>75% of all smart speakers sold to date are Amazon devices&nbsp;</li><li>The average Alexa user spends 18 minutes a month interacting with the device, compared to just five minutes for Google Home</li><li>There are now over 25,000 skills available for Alexa.</li></ul>

Amazon

Hardware: Harman/kardon Invoke speaker, Windows smartphones, Microsoft laptopsDigital Assistant: CortanaUsage Statistics:<ul><li>5.1% of smartphones have the Cortana assistant installed</li><li>Cortana now has 133 million monthly users&nbsp;</li><li>25% of Bing searches are by voice.</li></ul>

Microsoft

Smartphones were originally the sole place of residence for digital assistants like Siri and Cortana, but the concept has been decentralized over the past few years.At present, the focus is primarily on voice-activated home speakers, but this is essentially a Trojan horse strategy. By taking pride of place in a consumer’s home, these speakers are the gateway to the proliferation of smart devices that can be categorized under the broad ‘Internet of Things’ umbrella.

The Current Speech Recognition Landscape

We are still some distance from realizing the true potential of speech recognition technology. This applies both to the sophistication of the technology itself and to its integration into our lives. The current digital assistants can interpret speech very well, but they are not the conversational interfaces that the technology providers want them to be. Moreover, speech recognition remains limited to a small number of products.The rate of progress, compared to the earliest forays into speech recognition, is really quite phenomenal nonetheless.

The Future of Speech Recognition Technology

Hardware: Apple HomePod, iPhone, MacBooks, AirPodsDigital Assistant: SiriUsage Statistics:<ul><li>42.5% of smartphones have Apple’s Siri digital assistant installed&nbsp;</li><li>41.4 million monthly active users in the U.S. as of July 2017, down 15% on the previous year&nbsp;</li><li>19% of iPhone users engage with Siri at least daily.</li></ul>

Apple

<ul><li>IBM Tangora (the 1980s) could adjust to the speaker’s voice. It still required slow, clear speech and no background noise, but it allowed for increased flexibility through data clustering and the prediction of upcoming phonemes based on recent patterns.</li><li>It was only in 1997 that the world’s first “continuous speech recognizer” (ie. one no longer had to pause between each word) was released, in the form of Dragon’s NaturallySpeaking software. Capable of understanding 100 words per minute, it is still in use today (albeit in an upgraded form) and is favored by doctors for notation purposes.</li></ul>

Speech Recognition in The 80s and 90s

First-party Hardware: Google Home, Google Home Mini, Google Home Max, Pixelbook, Pixel smartphones, Pixel Buds, Chromecast, Nest smart home products.Digital Assistant: Google AssistantUsage Statistics:<ul><li>Google Home has a 24% share of the US smart speaker market</li><li>There are now over 1,000 Actions for Google Home</li><li>Google Assistant is available on over 225 home control brands and more than 1,500 devices&nbsp;</li><li>The most popular Google Assistant apps are games, followed closely by home control applications&nbsp;</li></ul>

Google

<ul><li>Machine learning has provided the majority of speech recognition breakthroughs in this century. Google combined the latest technology with the power of cloud-based computing to share data and improve the accuracy of machine learning algorithms.</li><li>This culminated in the launch of the Google Voice Search app for iPhone in 2008, It was Siri, Apple’s entry into the voice recognition market, that first captured the public’s imagination, however.</li><li>After Siri, Microsoft launched Cortana, Amazon launched Alexa.</li></ul>

Machine Learning and Speech Recognition 

The history of voice recognition technology pre-dates the entrance of Google, Amazon, and Apple. Here, we look at the past, present, and future of this technology.