Speech Recognizer (1952)
The first real pattern matcher was developed at AT&T Bell Labs:
In 1952, as the US government-funded research began to gain momentum, Bell Laboratories developed an automatic speech recognition system that successfully identified the digits 0 to 9 spoken to it over the telephone. Major developments at MIT followed. In 1959, a system successfully identified vowel sounds with 93% accuracy. Then seven years later, a system that had a vocabulary of 50 words was successfully tested. In the early 1970’s, the SUR program yielded its first substantial results. The HARPY system, at Carnegie Mellon University, could recognize complete sentences that consisted of a limited of range of grammar structures. But the computing power it required was prodigious; it took 50 contemporary computers to process a recognition channel. [source http://www.nexus.carleton.ca/~kekoura/history.html]