This note from 1969 implies that speech-recognition researchers were hardly more than charlatans. http://www.dragon-medical-transcription.com/history_speech_rec

This note from 1969 implies that speech-recognition researchers were hardly more than charlatans. http://www.dragon-medical-transcription.com/history_speech_recognition.html http://www.dragon-medical-transcription.com/history_speech_r... says that the founders of Dragon Systems (iirc the first successful speech-recognition company) started in 1970. (Though they didn't start the company until 1982.) So in retrospect I'd guess the level of funding at the time was closer to right than this critique, even if most of the work was flimflam. (The author wrote a popular book about information theory which I liked, so this is disappointing.)