Friday Facts pt. 2: Speech Recognition, US history and Dog Sleds. Oh my.

A few weeks ago, I shared pt. 1 via a post and thought it would be fun to create a series that explores different advancements/innovations with a special focus on AI/ML to help folks learn more about the rich history behind this technology.

If you know me, you know how much I love random facts. Hopefully, you'll soon learn some random facts that you can also slide into conversations with your friends at any given moment - to their absolute delight.

(This layout may cause some PTSD for people who look for recipes on the internet only to have to wade through someones very long, detailed life story that has absolutely no relevance to banana bread. I promise these all come together. but also: Feel free to skip to the TLDR at the bottom. )

This is a story I'm very excited about - here are the key themes:

• Innovation + tech (AI/ML)
• U.S. History (even some family history)
• Women in the workplace

Background:

The year is 1952, we're inside Bell Labs aka Southwestern Bell, which has a lot of rich US history rooting back to 1882. The result of many different mergers and acquisitions, this company changed names many times throughout history - most notably picking up the 'Bell' part of their name from the merger with The Missouri Bell Telephone Company in 1912.

If none of this rings a bell for you yet - you'll recognize the brands this rolled up into - AT&T // Western Electric // Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise // 诺基亚

Side character introduction

Enter my Great Grandma Catherine. In 1940 her husband (my Great Grandfather) was killed while on duty as a U.S. Coast Guard. He was only 33 and left her and two daughters under 2 behind.

At the time they were living near his post in the upper peninsula of Michigan in a very remote cabin without power. There was no pension or financial support available to widows at this time - so they were also left without any income in the middle of winter when they were almost out of firewood.

Catherine had to act fast and choose between buying firewood or using the money for bus fare. She chose to pack some belongings and her daughters onto a dog sled and head towards town to catch a bus to Chicago - where she'd heard women were getting jobs as switch operators for Illinois Bell - connected to the Southwestern bell network.

Headliner:

Now we introduce Audrey. Invented by HK Davis via Bell Labs in 1952. Audrey was a groundbreaking speech recognition system that could recognize spoken digits 0 - 9.

The system was massive in size - taking up a whole room and came with some other barriers:

• Computational limitations required special circuitry for each digit
• Slow processing speeds
• Large power consumption costs
• Could only recognize the inventors voice initially

All that made manual operators cheaper, faster and more effective so the tech debut didn't really change the course of operations too much at the time.

By Audrey's development, Grandma Catherine had been working at Illinois Bell for over a decade as one of a hundred women operators in Chicago. It was a very tough job - these women would sit at their board and not move from their seat again until shift was over. Many women would quit or break into tears mid shift from the stress.

Bell Labs was eventually able to utilize hardware advancements to improve compute and size, allowing Audrey to evolve to a consumer facing speech recognition voice operator rolled out in the 1980s. For Bell and the remaining women behind the switchboards, this marked the end of an era.

Conclusion

My Great Grandma continued working at Illinois Bell until she retired as night supervisor in the 1960s. Her thoughts on the advancing technology were very positive - since she knew the job of operator was one that many couldn't handle. Instead she was proud of her part in a technology revolution and stayed more up to date than most AT&T board members on advancements all the way until her passing at age 100.

Being a working women was rare enough during this time but as a widow with two children and dozens of other family members who needed support it really was a daunting feat. Many women "had to" remarry just to survive but she was able to do it all on her own because of the invention of telephone to begin with. It's crazy to think about how many revolutionary things she saw come to market over her lifetime.

Its too bad I can't talk to her about all that's happening now, I'd love to get her early tech worker perspective.

My Great Grandma can be seen in the the far bottom left with her infamous no smile photo face.

TLDR: Audrey was an early example of speech recognition launched in 1952 via Bell Labs that could understand digits 0-9 but it took until the 80's for it to get rolled out as a consumer facing operator

Sources:

Women running the boards

Bell labs history

Southwestern Bell

Grandma Pat (no link, she's not online)

#AI #ML #speechrecognition #innovation #women #womenintech #womeninwork #technology #technologyhistory #history #chicago #