Sultan of sound [speech technology]

This paper describes the pioneering research in the field of speech technology by James L. Flanagan, 2005 IEEE Medal of Honor awardee. Flanagan´s work with speech coding heralded a series of advances over the years, including a currently favored technique, linear predictive coding. After graduating from Mississippi State as an electrical engineering major, Flanagan accepted a graduate assistantship in MIT´s acoustics lab, which led to his seminal research in voice coding. Flanagan then worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories where he would spend the next 33 years. He climbed steadily up the ranks at Bell Labs, eventually becoming director of the Information Principles Research Laboratory. Among the projects that Flanagan was deeply involved in were the development of automatic speech recognition systems, voice mail, artificial larynx, and packet-switched voice technology.