Raj Reddy, an Indian scientist, is renowned as one of the pioneers in Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Voice-based AI chatbots such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant can now be found in almost every other household and on nearly all devices. However, not many are aware that the man responsible for the crucial technology behind these intelligent chatbots is Raj Reddy.
Raj Reddy, an Indian scientist, is recognized as an AI pioneer. Born as Dabbala Rajagopal Reddy in a village in Andhra Pradesh’s Chittoor district, he grew up with a farmer father and a homemaker mother.
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Reddy, the first in his family to pursue higher education, became a civil engineer before obtaining a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the prestigious Stanford University in 1966.
During his time at Stanford, Reddy initiated his research in AI. Over the course of several decades, he and his colleagues developed numerous early models of robotic voice control. Reddy is credited with inventing the first speech recognition technology known as Hearsay-I.
In 1994, Reddy became the first Indian and Asian recipient of the Turing Award, often regarded as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science. In 2001, India honored his exceptional work by awarding him the Padma Bhushan. Presently, Reddy serves as a professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in the US.
