Words into action II: A task-oriented system: Harpy is an experimental, continuous-speech recognition system that exploits a low-cost minicomputer

Automatic recognition of continuous speech can be accomplished if the vocabulary is restricted and the sentences limited to those used for a specific task. This is amply demonstrated by Harpy, one of the first such successful experimental systems. It showed in 1976 that it could retrieve documents upon voice request. Using a low-cost minicomputer, Harpy recognizes correctly 98 percent of the words in connected speech by a male or a female speaker, in almost real time, from a vocabulary of more than 1000 words.