Why We Don't Have HAL 9000...Yet
Speech is still a tool, and should be treated as such.
Roberto Pieraccini

In early May, Robert Fortner published a provocative, yet poorly informed blog post titled “Rest in Peas: the Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition,” in which he says speech recognition is dead because its accuracy falls far short of HAL-like levels of comprehension. Here is a summary of my response to his claim:

Saying that speech recognition is dead because its accuracy falls far short of HAL-like levels of comprehension is like saying aeronautical engineering is dead because commercial airplanes cannot go faster than 1,000 miles per hour and get people to the moon. There are limitations in any of our technologies, but the major limitations we perceive are the result of our false assumptions and wrong uses of them. Speech recognition is not about building HAL 9000, the supercomputer in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

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