The Lost History of "Talking to Computers": And What It Teaches Us About AI Exuberance

Much science fiction has humans talking to computers, an early example being HAL in the movie 2001 in 1968. That vision motivated many people to attempt making the imagined technology real, including the author, who founded a company developing speech recognition technology in the 1980s. Speech recognition was an early part of Artificial Intelligence, computers doing a task that had previously been exclusive to humans, and proved to be more difficult than early pioneers expected. The Lost H...