RIPAC was a

VLSI Very large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) ...

single-chip

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circu ...

designed for automatic recognition of the

connected speech In linguistics, connected speech or connected discourse is a continuous sequence of sounds forming utterances or conversations in spoken language. Analysis of connected speech shows sound changes affecting linguistic units traditionally described ...

, one of the first of this use. The project of the microprocessor RIPAC started in 1984. RIPAC was aimed to provide efficient real-time

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ma ...

services to the italian telephone system provided by SIP. The microprocessor was presented in September 1986 at

The Hague The Hague ( ; nl, Den Haag or ) is a list of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality of the Netherlands, situated on the west coast facing the North Sea. The Hague is the country's ad ...

(Netherlands) at EUSPICO conference. It was composed of 70.000 transistors and structured as

Harvard architecture The Harvard architecture is a computer architecture with separate storage and signal pathways for instructions and data. It contrasts with the von Neumann architecture, where program instructions and data share the same memory and pathways. ...

. The name RIPAC is the acronym for "Riconoscimento del PArlato Connesso", that means "Recognition of the connected speech" in Italian. The microprocessor was designed by the Italian companies

CSELT Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni (CSELT) was an Italian research center for telecommunication based in Torino, the biggest in Italy and one of the most important in Europe. It played a major role internationally especially in the stand ...

and ELSAG and was produced by SGS: a combination of

Hidden Markov Model A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process — call it X — with unobservable ("''hidden''") states. As part of the definition, HMM requires that there be an ob ...

and

Dynamic Time Warping In time series analysis, dynamic time warping (DTW) is an algorithm for measuring similarity between two temporal sequences, which may vary in speed. For instance, similarities in walking could be detected using DTW, even if one person was walki ...

algorithms was used for processing speech signals. It was able to do real-time speech recognition of Italian and many languages with a good affordability. The chip, issued b
U.S. Patent No. 4,907,278
worked at first run.

References

Bibliography

* * {{cite journal, last1=Cecinati , first1=Riccardo , last2=Ciaramella , first2=Alberto , last3= Venuti , first3=Giovanni , last4=Vicenzi , first4=Cesare , title= A Custom Integrated Circuit with Dynamic Time Warping for Speech Recognition, journal= CSELT Technical Reports, volume= 15, number =1, year= 1987 * R. Cecinati, A. Ciaramella, L. Licciardi, M. Paolini, R. Tasso, & G. Venuti (1990). U.S. Patent No. 4,907,278. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Application-specific integrated circuits Digital signal processors Speech recognition Speech recognition hardware