Fact · Speech recognition
The 2026 draft of Jurafsky and Martin's textbook says that understanding spoken language, or at least transcribing it into writing, is one of the earliest goals of computer language processing.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“Understanding spoken language, or at least transcribing the words into writing, is one of the earliest goals of computer language processing.”
Speech and Language Processing, Chapter 16: Automatic Speech Recognition (draft), Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Stanford University, online manuscript of the third edition, 2026, Chapter 16, opening paragraph.
Open the original- What it measures
- The chapter opens its treatment of automatic speech recognition with this sentence, placing speech recognition inside the broader field of computer language processing.
- What it does not show
- A textbook's framing, not a measurement. It does not say how the field divides between speech and text work.