The IBM Shoebox could understand just 16 spoken words

The IBM Shoebox, demonstrated at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, recognized exactly 16 spoken words. IBM’s archives state the machine “would recognize 16 words spoken into its microphone and convert those sounds into electrical impulses.” Those 16 were the ten digits, zero through nine, plus six command words including “plus,” “minus,” and “total,” which let a person dictate a simple sum and have an attached adding machine compute it. The tiny vocabulary underscores how far early speech recognition was from the open-ended dictation of today’s assistants.