50 Years of Progress in Speech and Speaker Recognition Research

Research in automatic speech and speaker recognition has now spanned five decades. This paper surveys the major themes and advances made in the past fifty years of research so as to provide a technological perspective and an appreciation of the fundamental progress that has been accomplished in this important area of speech communication. Although many techniques have been developed, many challenges have yet to be overcome before we can achieve the ultimate goal of creating machines that can communicate naturally with people. Such a machine needs to be able to deliver a satisfactory performance under a broad range of operating conditions. A much greater understanding of the human speech process is required before automatic speech and speaker recognition systems can approach human performance.