Neural Networks, Hieroglyphs, and Speech AI: A History of Transcription

Speech transcription has a long history dating back to ancient Egypt's hieroglyphics and ancient Greece's Homeric Greek. Over time, various forms of writing were used for documentation purposes. In the early years, handwritten transcriptions by scribes were commonplace until shorthand was introduced in the 17th century, revolutionizing note-taking speed. The invention of the typewriter and stenographer keyboards further improved transcription efficiency. Speech recognition technology emerged in the 1950s with Bell Labs' Automatic Digit Recognizer, followed by IBM's Shoebox machine in the 1960s. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) were introduced in the 1980s for speech recognition, leading to practical tools like Dragon Dictate in the 1990s. In the 2000s, research focused on machine translation and speaker independence. Deep learning methods emerged in the late 2000s, with Google's voice service, GOOG-411, being a significant milestone. Since then, end-to-end automatic speech recognition has gained popularity, and recent developments include Amazon Transcribe Medical and Meta's Massively Multilingual Speech project. Despite advances in machine transcription, there is still work to be done, particularly for languages other than English.