Speech Recognition through the Decades
From: PCWorld - 11/02/2011
By: Melanie Pinola

People are impressed with the iPhone 4S's Siri, but how did such
sophisticated speech recognition technology come to be? It started back in
the 1950s. 

Looking back on the development of speech recognition technology is like
watching a child grow up, progressing from the baby-talk level of recognizing
single syllables, to building a vocabulary of thousands of words, to
answering questions with quick, witty replies, as Apple's supersmart virtual
assistant Siri does. 

Listening to Siri, with its slightly snarky sense of humor, made us wonder
how far speech recognition has come over the years. Here's a look at the
developments in past decades that have made it possible for people to control
devices using only their voice. 

Read the entire article and view a video (1:01) at:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/243060/speech_recognition_through_the_decades_how_we_ended_up_with_siri.html