Automated speech recognition has gone from clunky demos and wild dreams in the 1950s to a ubiquitous productivity tool today. We’ll sketch this evolution and growth, highlighting some key milestones along the way. In doing so, we’ll explore the who’s, how’s, and why’s of the investments that made this possible, as the technology progressed from analog filters to machine learning. Along the way we’ll explain the basics of audio processing, phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics – fancy words linguists use to break down the amazing process of moving concepts and knowledge of the world from one brain to another via language. We’ll even do a shallow dive into the Hidden Markov Models that underlie most of today’s speech recognition systems, and the art of designing dialogs that compensate for their shortcomings. Finally, we’ll touch on the debate about how close we really are to the holy grail of “natural language understanding”. Is The Singularity™ right around the corner or not? Co-sponsored by: Pikes Peak Computer Society Speaker(s): Mark Holthouse, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/269461