RIPAC was a VLSI single-chip

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor (computing), processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, a ...

designed for automatic recognition of the connected speech, 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. It is also ...

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

The Hague The Hague ( ) is the capital city of the South Holland province of the Netherlands. With a population of over half a million, it is the third-largest city in the Netherlands. Situated on the west coast facing the North Sea, The Hague is the c ...

(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 computer storage, storage and signal pathways for Machine code, instructions and data. It is often contrasted with the von Neumann architecture, where program instructions and d ...

. 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 Telecom Italia Lab S.p.A. (formerly Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni S.p.A.; CSELT) is 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 r ...

and ELSAG and was produced by SGS: a combination of

Hidden Markov Model A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a Markov model in which the observations are dependent on a latent (or ''hidden'') Markov process (referred to as X). An HMM requires that there be an observable process Y whose outcomes depend on the outcomes of X ...

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 walk ...

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