History of Speech and Language Technology

James K. Baker received his A.B. from Princeton University, and his Ph.D. in computer science (Stochastic Processing as a Means of Speech Recognition) from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1975, having previously worked as a Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analysis from 1963-1972. He worked as a Research Staff Member in the IBM Continuous Speech Recognition Group from 1974-1979, and as Vice President for Advanced Development for Verbex (Exxon Enterprises) from 1979-1982 before cofounding Dragon Systems in 1982, where he served 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. From 2007-2009, Jim served as Director of Research and Chief Scientist for the Center of Excellence in Human Language at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a Distinguished Career Professor at Carnegie-Mellon University and works as an entrepreneur, researcher, and consultant. James Baker is best known for his pioneering work in introducing stochastic processing and Hidden Markov Models to speech recognition, creating practical technology, and now is pursuing new paradigms for automatic learning, especially for multilingual speech technology. Jim is inventor or co-inventor of over 20 U.S. patents.

An interview was conducted with Dr. James Baker in Newton, MA on December 21, 2006, by Dr. Patri Pugliese. The text of this interview has not yet been transcribed, but the recorded interview, including a discussion of stochastic processing and speech recognition, is available.

Recorded interview (67 mins.).