by John Moosmiller
I joined Bell Labs in October, 1983 (a year after Chemical Abstracts graciously funded my Masters in CIS). I think the “official” internal venture approval came a few months later. The public venture launch was in San Francisco in September, 1985. Almost immediately when I joined in 1983, I was assigned by Dean Hester to find trial sites for speech recognition transactions that could work robustly over limited bandwidth telephony networks. Bob Perdue will recall the focus on keyword recognition and the use of error-correcting catalog code numbers.
I cold-called Fortune 100 R&D executives and found that doors opened in many cases by merely saying I was in a Bell Labs research project that would revolutionize the human-computer interface using computational linguistics and natural language processing.* Some of the most memorable trips Dean and I made in early 1984 or thereabouts were to LLBean (then only one store and factory in Freeport, ME), a phone-in, drive through grocery store start-up in Los Angeles, and Fidelity Investments in Boston that ultimately did lead to a successful trial. It was exciting and exhausting to be prospecting for customers before we had a marketing organization.
Dean was tightly wound and by nature an introvert, but he had a vision and could intellectually override his nature to achieve his ends. On long airplane rides, he would unwind by listening to the BBC RADIO dramatization of the Lord of the Rings (1981) on his Sony Walkman.**
* The late Gene Rissanen and Bob Perdue got US Patent #5003574A for a “voice capture system” that had these possible applications.
** That BBC LOTR adaptation was quite good with Ian Holm as Frodo, Michael Hordern as Gandalf, and Bill Nighy as Sam Gamgee.
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