A Proud Heritage
Aurix automatic speech recognition technology is based on research and development work carried out in the United Kingdom (U.K.) over the last 50 years, initially in U.K. government facilities. There were two early streams of research. One was a speech technology stream, which was initially within the Post Office in the late 1950s and later moved into a U.K. intelligence agency, GCHQ. The other was a military stream within the U.K. Ministry of Defense (MOD).
The two streams were brought together in 1986 as the U.K. Government's ‘Speech Research Unit’ (SRU), located at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern, U.K. RSRE was incorporated into the Defense Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) which became a U.K. government owned trading fund agency. Later the commercial technology company QinetiQ (www.qinetiq.com) was formed from DERA.
Aurix was founded as 20/20 Speech in November 1999 as an equity venture between NXT plc (www.nxtsound.com) and DERA to capitalize on the growing market for speech technology. This unique combination merged the world-class capabilities of the U.K. Government's ‘Speech Research Unit’ (SRU), with the commercial drive of a global technology licensing company. All of the resources, people and intellectual property were transferred into Aurix Limited. In 2005 the company name was changed from 20/20 Speech to Aurix Limited and QinetiQ Group plc took back majority control of the company.
During the last five decades, Aurix and its forerunner teams have achieved many milestones. Among the most notable are the:
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1960s |
First demonstration of human-quality synthetic speech.
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Development of one of the world's first text-to-speech synthesizers.
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1970s |
Launch of the Prize-winning 'LOGOS' continuous ASR system.
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1980s |
Pioneering high-accuracy “hidden Markov model” based
continuous speech recognition (especially in noisy environments).
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1990s |
Development of the groundbreaking 'ARMADA' real-time
airborne reconnaissance report recognizer.
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Development of one of the first application-independent ASR
prototyping systems, (transputer based Windows-based system design kit).
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'CyberTranscriber', an off-line web-based document transcription system,
in partnership with Speech Machines plc. |
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2000s |
Aurix branded range of products is launched utilizing phonetic-based
voice recognition for speech content management applications. |
Today, Aurix enjoys a proud heritage as global innovators in the application of speech technology.
Backgrounder
For a copy of the latest Aurix Ltd. Backgrounder in pdf format, please click here.
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