History of Speech and Language Technology

Janet M. Baker received her B.S. from Tufts University and her Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University. She worked for IBM Research (time-domain speech recognition), and then served as VP Research for Verbex, (Exxon Enterprises). She was Co-Founder and CEO of Dragon Systems (Newton, MA). Founded in 1982 with bootstrap financing, Dragon Systems grew profitably to 380 employees globally and $68 million/yr revenues, before its sale in 2000. Among its many innovations, Dragon created the first commercial general-purpose speech dictation software, Dragon NaturallySpeaking®, as well as the first audiomining, a general purpose audio-search engine. Janet has worked cooperatively with the international speech community to help make available large speech data corpora and to foster rigorous performance evaluation methodologies. After founding Saras Institute, she worked with the Dibner Institute at MIT, to collect, preserve, and make generally available information on the History of Speech and Language Technology. Since 2008, she has collaborated with neuroscientists at the University of California, San Diego, the Harvard-MIT Division of Health, Science, and Technology, and Massachusetts General Hospital. Together they are collecting and processing cortical data to learn how the human brain represents, processes, and decodes speech and language information. Janet also lectures at business schools and other forums on topics relating to Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

A excerpt of a 2007 interview with Dr. Baker can be found here.