This document summarizes research on the development of speech recognition technology. It discusses early devices from the 1920s that could recognize simple words based on acoustic features. It then outlines key advances in the 1960s by IBM and in the 1970s through US Defense funding. By the 1990s, speech recognition systems could achieve reasonable accuracy for dictation tasks. The document discusses techniques like hidden Markov models that were important to progress. It provides historical context on the foundations of modern speech recognition.