Cantonese Voice Input Software Full Of Coal

To build his dictation engine, Chen broke Mandarin down into its smallest elements, called phonemes.

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In 1937, the year that George Orwell was shot in the neck while fighting fascists in Spain, Julian Chen was born in Shanghai.

His parents, a music teacher and a chemist, enrolled him in a school run by Christian missionaries, and like Orwell he became fascinated by language.

He studied English, Russian, and Mandarin while speaking Shanghainese at home.

In 1949, the year Mao Zedong came to power and Orwell published 1984, learning languages became dangerous in China.

In the purges of the late 1950s, intellectuals were denounced, sent to labor camps, and even executed.

Chen, who by then was a student at prestigious Peking University, was banished to a Beijing glass factory.

Cantonese Voice Input Software Full Of Coal

Chens job was to cart wagons full of coal and ash to and from the factorys furnace.

At night, in the workers dormitory, he compiled a sort of linguistic ethnography for the Beijing dialect.

Related Stories Return to Sender MIT Cuts Ties With Chinese AI Firm Amid Human Rights Concerns Will Knight Opression Inside Chinas Massive Surveillance Operation Isobel Cockerell You Are a Number Inside Chinas Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking Mara Hvistendahl His fortunes improved after Maos death, when party leaders realized that Chinas economy needed intellectuals in order to develop.

Chen went back to school, and in 1979, at the age of 42, his test scores earned him a spot in the first group of graduate students to go abroad in decades.

He moved to the US and earned a PhD in physics at Columbia University.

At the time, America offered more opportunity than China, and like many of his peers, Chen stayed after graduation, getting a job with IBM working on physical science research.

IBM had developed some of the worlds first speech recognition software, which allowed professionals to haltingly dictate messages without touching a keyboard, and in 1994 the company started looking for someone to adapt it to Mandarin.

Right away, Chen realized that in China speech recognition software could offer far more than a dictation tool for office workers; he believed it stood to completely transform communication in his native tongue.

By the 1980s, as the first personal computers arrived in China, programmers had come up with several workarounds.

The most common method used pinyin, the system of romanized spelling for Mandarin that Chinese students learn in school.

Using this approach, to write cat you would type m-a-o, then choose from a drop-down menu that also included characters meaning trade and hat, and the surname of Mao Zedong.

Because Mandarin has so many homophones, typing became an inefficient exercise in word selection.