Carnegie Mellon University and University of California and Berkeley researchers have received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to move automatic speech recognition from software into hardware.

The goal is to create a radically new silicon chip architecture that does speech recognition up to 1,000 times more efficiently than a conventional computer and that can be incorporated in portable devices like cell phones and PDAs.

“Homeland security applications are the big reason we were chosen for this award,” says Rob A. Rutenbar, project leader and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon. “Imagine if an emergency responder could query a critical online database with voice alone, without returning to a vehicle, in a noisy and dangerous environment. The possibilities are endless.”

Carnegie Mellon University news release