Speech Understanding and AI/AI and Speech Understanding

The Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense sponsored a five year research program wi th the goal of developing a speech understanding system capable of engaging a human operator in a natural conversat ion concerning a specific task domain. Among the just i f icat ions fot undertaking the enterpr ise in 1971 were the developments in artif icial intelligence taking place at that per iod. The culmination of this program in 1976 wi th the demonstrat ion of a system that met the target specif icat ions set out at the beginning provides an oppor tun i ty for an overal l rev iew of the contr ibutions of artif icial intel l igence to speech understanding research and of the implications for art i f ic ial intell igence of the research on speech understanding.