Fact · Speech recognition
Juang and Rabiner write that Hearsay-II and BBN's HWIM did not meet the DARPA program's performance goal when it ended in 1976.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“Neither Hearsay-II nor HWIM (Hear What I Mean) met the DARPA program’s performance goal at its conclusion in 1976.”
Automatic Speech Recognition: A Brief History of the Technology Development, B. H. Juang and Lawrence R. Rabiner, Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (author copy, UC Santa Barbara), 2005, Section on the DARPA Speech Understanding Research program.
Open the original- What it measures
- The same review says Carnegie Mellon's Harpy was shown to recognize speech using a 1,011-word vocabulary, and credits Harpy with a graph search method.
- What it does not show
- Describes the outcome for two of the program's systems. It does not give word error rates for them.