Although the largest strides in the development of voice recognition technology have occurred in the past two decades, this technology really began with Alexander Graham Bell's inventions in the 1870s. By discovering how to convert air pressure waves (sound) into electrical impulses, he began the process of uncovering the scientific and mathematical basis of understanding speech.

In the 1950s, Bell Laboratories developed the first effective speech recognizer for numbers. In the 1970s, the ARPA Speech Understanding Research project developed the technology further - in particular by recognizing that the objective of automatic speech recognition is the understanding of speech not merely the recognition of words.

By the 1980s, two distinct types of commercial products were available. The first offered speaker-independent recognition of small vocabularies. It was most useful for telephone transaction processing. The second, offered by Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Dragon Systems, and IBM, focused on the development of large-vocabulary voice recognition systems so that text documents could be created by voice dictation.

Over the past two decades, voice recognition technology has developed to the point of real-time, continuous speech systems that augment command, security, and content creation tasks with exceptionally high accuracy.