History of Speech and Language Technology

Janet MacIver Baker earned her B.S. at Tufts University, and her Ph.D in Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1975. She worked as a Research Staff Member in the IBM Continuous Speech Recognition Group from 1974 to 1979, and as Vice President for Research for Verbex (Exxon Enterprises) from 1979-1982 before cofounding Dragon Systems in 1982, where she served first as President, and later as CEO and Chairman. Dragon Systems introduced audiomining in 1994, produced the first general-purpose commercial dictation system in 1997, and has been broadly recognized as a technology and market leader. Today’s applications range from general-purpose dictation, voice transcription and audio search to speech interfaces for smart phones and intelligent agents, as well as automotive systems. In 2000, Janet Baker founded Saras Institute, and from 2005-2007 was a Visiting Scholar at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT. In addition to her technical contributions and commercial initiatives, Janet has helped lead multiple projects within the international community to create large nonproprietary databases and to foster rigorous performance evaluation methodologies. She presently conducts neuroscience research applying machine learning to speech and language processing in the brain. She also guest lectures on entrepreneurship at business schools, and has part-time appointments as a Lecturer in Otology and Laryngology at Harvard Medical School, and as a Visiting Scientist at the MIT Media Lab. In 2010, she was elected an ISCA Fellow.

Dr.. Janet Baker delivered an MIT Techfair Techtalk on “Speech Recognition; Past, Present, and Future!” on February 11, 2012
http://Techfair.mit.edu/events/talks

An interview was conducted with Dr. Janet Baker in Newton, MA on January 18, 2007 by Dr. Patri Pugliese. The text of this interview has not yet been transcribed, but a brief excerpt of the recorded interview is available.

Brief excerpt of recorded interview.