Most people know AT&T as “the telephone company,” but have little concept that they actually developed a ton of other technology still in use today. Beginning in the 1980’s, AT&T implemented automated speech recognition technology across its networks, and has continued to streamline the system ever since. Rather than simply understanding the words, AT&T’s speech recognition uses artificial intelligent to actually understand the spoken language.

At times, interfacing with other software seems counterproductive, given that it will often take written (or typed) data and read it back as voice before processing commands, but when you’re looking at the most advanced speech recognition in the world, it does make an odd bit of sense.