Computer recognition of speech using zero-crossing information

In the present age of scientific discovery, man has become more and more dependent on the use of electronic computers. As this powerful tool becomes more universally important in man's day-to-day existence, it becomes increasingly more annoying that he has to speak to it in its mode of communication, paper tape or punch cards; and not in his own, the spoken word. Even today in the very infancy of the computer age, the time required to do many computations is less than the time required to instruct the machine in how to do them. All this points to the need of a method of achieving machine recognition of speech. In this paper an electronic speech processor is described which provides an analog voltage output based on the difference signal between the first speech formant and the second. Machine recognition of numbers zero through nine was very good when the speech processor output was sampled and compared with previously recorded memory-stored data in a small digital computer.