The Lost History of "Talking to Computers"

And What It Tells Us About AI Exuberance

The Lost History of "Talking to Computers"

And What It Tells Us About AI Exuberance

About The Lost History of Talking to Computers

27 years of speech recognition history

Speech recognition—using human language to connect with computers—is an area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that has caught people’s imagination and challenged hundreds of companies to make it a reality. The Lost History of “Talking to Computers” documents 27 years of efforts by companies and the individuals driving them to connect us to computers using human language and to make a financial success of the effort. It is based on the 309 monthly newsletters on commercial developments in speech recognition that I published for 27 years.

The book discusses how the history of speech recognition provides insights into today’s exuberance over Artificial Intelligence.

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The Long Version of The Lost History

The book references the number of companies trying to commercialize speech recognition technology in each of the 27 years between 1993-2019. The book couldn’t cover all the companies that were covered in the originally newsletter published in those years without becoming an encyclopedia, but it is supplemented by this web site which documents the companies covered in more detail as well as those not covered. This web site is an encyclopedia, about the length of 35 books. The documents accessible through the links below are intended as a reference, not for casual reading. They are intended to document the number of companies trying to commercialize speech recognition in each year as cited in the book.

The yearly summaries may not seem like summaries, but they are shorter versions of William Meisel’s newsletters on commercial developments in speech recognition, 309 monthly issues. They are summarized, with perspective provided by hindsight, in the 2025 book The Lost History of “Talking to Computers”: And What It Teaches Us About AI Exuberance.