What technological architecture crystallized in the 1980s underpinning modern ASR systems?
Answer
Hidden Markov Models (HMMs)
The technological structure that became the mainstream foundation for modern Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which in turn supports speech analytics, crystallized during the 1980s with the widespread adoption of Hidden Markov Models, or HMMs. HMMs provided a sophisticated, probabilistic framework suitable for modeling sequential data inherent in speech. This allowed systems to calculate the most probable sequence of words from a given acoustic signal, even when that signal was contaminated by noise or contained variations in pronunciation. This probabilistic approach marked a substantial theoretical leap forward compared to the previous reliance on rigid template-matching techniques.

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