Word: shoebox
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...guest list to Mrs. David Ginsburg, ticket chairman. Mrs. Ginsburg was slightly surprised to see "Trigger Mike" Coppola and "Tony Ducks'' Corallo on the list. And when she saw the name Hoffa, she "knew something was wrong." Indeed there was. Ethel had picked the wrong shoebox-the one with the cards compiled by Husband Bobby while he was counsel for the Senate's McClellan committee, investigating labor racketeering...
...speech recognizer, called "Shoebox" because it is smaller than a shoe box, so far recognizes only 16 spoken words, including the ten digits and six arithmetical command words such as plus and minus. But this is no mean feat. Earlier attempts to make machines recognize spoken words have run into trouble because they tried to copy the human ear, which analyzes the complicated mixture of sound frequencies in human speech. IBM Engineer William C. Dersch, inventor of Shoebox, thinks that this is like designing an airplane by copying a bird's feathers. His machine does not depend on sound...
...Shoebox is not distracted by ordinary room noises-even loud ones-but Dersch talks into its microphone gently and takes pains to pronounce his words completely. Shoebox listens and dutifully prints numbers and symbols on a roll of paper. When it hears "false," it washes out everything it holds in its small memory. It recognizes words spoken fast or slow, or in high or low pitch. It is not disturbed if 'six is pronounced "seex," but it insists on being obtuse if "five" is pronounced "fi'," as is common in rapid speech...
...immediate plans to graft Shoebox on any of its information-handling machines, but a bright gleam glows in the eyes of its engineers. They will first increase Shoebox's vocabulary to 1,000 words, then to 10,000. This can be done without much difficulty, they think, since multisyllabic words are comparatively easy to recognize. They will also try to make Shoebox recognize mumbled, slurred, and female voices; at present it can handle only the words of clear-spoken males. Most foreign languages are no problem for Shoebox, but it is baffled by Chinese, Bantu and other tongues that...
...When Shoebox grows up, IBM may set it to work taking down spoken words and numbers for such harried people as airplane pilots or supermarket checkers. Later, it may graduate to recording customers' orders, controlling machine tools, or solving mathematical problems. Eventually, the day may come when a troubled scientist or businessman can tell his problem by voice to the listening ear of an electronic computer-and get a spoken oracle answer soon after he stops talking...