I've been following speech recognition, in particular, since the mid-90s. Around 2000, after many hours of training the best speech recognition software availa

I've been following speech recognition, in particular, since the mid-90s. Around 2000, after many hours of training the best speech recognition software available commercially, with a slight speech impediment (which does not confuse people, for some reason) I personally concluded that even tailored speech recognition of general speech for a specific person was not viable yet. General purpose speech recognition of an arbitrary speaker perhaps with an accent that was even 80% accurate would be a long, long time away. If you had asked me to guess I'd probably have said after 2050. I remember a presentation by Bill Gates, about the cutting edge statistical modelling based translation and speech recognition at Microsoft, similar to what Google was doing. The software was live-transcribing him, well enough that he could be understood. I was floored. Assuming this wasn't tailored to Bill specifically for the demo, it was revolutionary technology of the kind I had expected to take much longer to develop. That was 2008. At the time the notion that speech might become a common interface still seemed rather far-fetched to many. By 2018 such tech was everywhere. Deep learning based models have now closed much of the remaining gap in just the last couple years.