hangul korean writing system

Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People

24 letters - 14 consonants and 10 vowels. the interesting thing is, that the shapes of the consontants are "graphical representations of the speech organs used to pronounce them".

'designers must understand acoustic memory and prosody' ...

Since speaking consumes precious cognitive resources, it is difficult to solve problems at the same time. Proficient keyboard users can have higher levels of parallelism in problem solving while performing data entry. This may explain why after 30 years of ambitious attempts to provide military pilots with speech recognition in cockpits, aircraft designers persist in using hand-input devices and visual displays. (the limits of speech recognition)

instead of getting annoyed of these call center programs, just don't press any button and you get forwarded to a human being. that's their build in fall back solution for angry and frustrated user. (haven't found one where that wasn't the case and it takes the same amount of time anyway.) i think it reduces occurrences of situations, where someone tries to shrink human beings to click puppets.

machinetranslation (application/pdf, 190 KB) early steps and nice overview by w. john hutchins

sputnik. the thing that really got people worried was sputnik. It was a terrible shock to the americans and they said: my god, that means that the russian technology, which we thought was - i don’t know - in the stone age or something – they can really do things and they threw money at all of these things; particular machine translation and stuff like that. but of course, you can’t deliver results instantly ... (karen spärck remembers those days)

and than came the alpac report 1966

Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) at the instigation of sponsors of machine translation. It reported in 1966 [10] that machine translation was slower, less accurate and twice as expensive as human translation and recommended no further investment. Research in the United States suffered immediate reductions and machine translation became no longer a 'respectable' scientific pursuit.(the second period, 1954-1966: optimism and disillusion, w. john hutchins)