"WE LIVE IN AN AGE of increasingly smart machines. In recent years, engineers have pushed into areas, from voice recognition to robotics to search engines, that once seemed to be the preserve of humans. But I.B.M. has a particular knack for pitting man against machine. In 1997, the company's supercomputer Deep Blue famously beat the grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess, a feat that generated enormous publicity for I.B.M. It did not, however, produce a marketable product; the technical accomplishment - playing chess really well - didn't translate to real-world business problems and so produced little direct profit for I.B.M. In the mid '00s, the company's top executives were looking for another high-profile project that would provide a similar flood of global publicity. But this time, they wanted a "grand challenge" (as they call it internally), that would meet a real-world need. "
A very clear explanation of how a voice-recognition system works, with useful diagrams. Very helpful for the System Fundamentals part of the course, and provides an opportunity to discuss analog and digital data too.