Nice article with a lot of information. Honest question here: you make some strong claims, have you been involved in speech recognition research, or are you an informed outsider? It seems like the latter? Poking fun at AI optimists like Kurzweil is fun, but not insightful at this time. The field has taken a different direction since then and I'm not sure that people know where corpus based statistical methods are going to go. Again, honest question.
Correct surmise: I'm not a speech recognition researcher. I'm a science and technology writer.
I was very surprised to find that recognition accuracy stopped getting better a long time ago. I do poke fun, but I also think Kurzweil (as I said in the piece) very reasonably believed that Moore's Law would get us a long way to AI. And surprisingly, it hasn't.
I like to think I don't have a stake in the argument and just let what's actual decide whether or not we're going to get to computer understanding of language and/or AI.
