Editing DARPA Speech Understanding Research (section)

== Introduction ==
DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a research agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies, among which in the 70s was speech recognition, for use by the military. As the DARPA's then-director George Heilemeir declared, "''Get computers to read Morse code in the presence of other code and noise, '''get computers to identify/detect key words in a stream of speech''', [...] make a real contribution to command and control, and; do a good thing in sonar"''<ref>Gaon, A. H. (2021). ''The future of copyright in the age of artificial intelligence''. Edward Elgar Publishing.</ref>. Consequently, the project received funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, particularly the Navy, given its potential military applications.

Given the military context, the project was subject to specific strict requirements. Notably, it needed to recognize multiple speakers simultaneously and achieve real-time speech recognition with no delays. As a result, the project's research objectives were defined as follows:

* Accepting connected speech
* Recognizing speech from multiple cooperative speakers
* Accepting 1,000 words
* Yielding only <10% semantic errors
* Achieving real-time understanding

This is the reason why it is ''understanding'' in the first place, and not ''recognition'': to attain successful understanding what was said or what was intented to be said rathern than simple recognizing some words taken out of context.