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   Artificial Intelligence Pioneer Marvin Minsky Dies at 88

   Adam C. Engst

   It is with great sorrow that I note the passing of [1]Marvin Minsky,
   one of the great minds in the field of artificial intelligence, at age
   88. While his achievements in computing at MIT are well-chronicled
   elsewhere, such as [2]this New York Times obituary, I'll remember him
   as a TidBITS reader and for his openness and kindness. Although plans
   to meet up at Macworld Boston never came to fruition, I exchanged email
   with him back in 1992 about Apple's Casper voice recognition technology
   (see '[3]Casper Speaks,' 9 March 1992), which evolved into a system
   called PlainTalk (see '[4]Bossing Your Mac with PlainTalk,' 28 August
   2000).

   In that 1992 conversation, Marvin wrote about his worry in regard to
   speaker-independent recognition, which at the time seemed like a tall
   order. (Keep in mind that this is the era of the 'wicked fast'
   Macintosh IIfx, and well before the Internet became popular.)

     In fact, I don't doubt that Apple and Kai-Fu are way ahead, etc. It
     is only that I have much concern about 'speaker-independent'
     recognition in any case. When a stranger says a few words, you don't
     always get it ' and I suspect that we usually start with a bit of
     small talk, not only to establish social ease, but to establish a
     phoneme lookup table! I hope they don't kill the golden goose by
     trying to avoid this! In fact, you could do this just once, by being
     asked to repeat a sentence or two; then I should think that the
     system could incorporate a crude 'voiceprint' system to recognize
     who you are, etc. I'd rather talk to my workstation for a few
     minutes then be constantly correcting errors. Well, of course
     they've thought of all that!

   He wasn't wrong ' although there have been speech recognition systems
   since that time (Matt Neuburg wrote about one, with background on the
   field, in '[5]Talk Is Cheap ' ViaVoice Enhanced Edition,' 21 August
   2000), speaker-independent recognition has become truly widespread only
   in the past few years with the releases of Siri in iOS, Google Now, and
   Microsoft's Cortana (Tom's Guide has [6]a nice comparison of the three
   voice assistants). And even these technologies are far from perfect.

   On a more personal level, Marvin closed that discussion with these kind
   words.

     And thanks for your terrific public service. I read TidBITS
     frequently and, as a result, my IIfx has more control panels and
     extensions than is safe. Needs booting pretty often!

   I don't know for how much longer Marvin kept reading TidBITS, but I'll
   cherish the thought that our efforts were of use in his work, even if
   only in an everyday computing environment.

References

   1. http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/
   2. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/business/marvin-minsky-pioneer-in-artificial-intelligence-dies-at-88.html
   3. http://tidbits.com/article/3193
   4. http://tidbits.com/article/6090
   5. http://tidbits.com/article/6085
   6. http://www.tomsguide.com/us/best-voice-assistant,review-2893.html