Bill Gates on innovation in speech technology

Here is part of an interview with Bill Gates on innovation.

Asked whether innovation is incremental, BG said:

What about speech recognition? In the 1960s, people did 20% accuracy speech recognition. And the things we've done over a period of years to get to 30%, 40%, 50% -- is that incremental? Our speech server absolutely is a collection of about 5k incremental improvements in speech recognition that lead to a paradigm shift of how you interact with the computer. Most breakthroughs are a compilation, where a ton of incremental improvements come together.

You probably need to subscribe to get the full article since this blog gives another quote from the 'same' interview:

"We've invested 10 years in the Tablet PC" -- Microsoft's platform for pen-computing, which has won only modest adoption. "We were in there even before the fad came along and after the fad went away. . . . We've been working on speech recognition for a long, long, long, long time!" The Speech Server project began around 1995. It too has cost close to $100 million a year.

Everything depends on how you define the beginning of a project, because MS has been doing speech recognition since 1993, and of course all that work is behind what you see in today's Speech Server. But the same technology also shows up in Office, Windows (SAPI), Voice Command for PocketPC, and lots of cool upcoming products as well.

We talk internally a lot about our tenacity, and how we just never give up. We definitely think that way on the speech team, where one of our favorite discussions is about what we think the state of the art will be 5-10 years from now. It's especially fun to talk about stuff you know we'll be around to see implemented.