During the first 4 years, several significant milestones have been reached by participants of the DARPA strategic computing speech program in the development of recognition systems, related component technology, and common speech databases and research tools. From the systems' standpoint, speaker‐dependent, ‐adaptive, and ‐independent systems that operate in several times real time with word error rates that range between 5% and 10% have been demonstrated with a 1000‐word vocabulary and a language model perplexity of 60. Real‐time performance of isolated‐word, speaker‐dependent, 100‐word recognition systems that operate under noisy and stressful environments was demonstrated with word accuracy of better than 98%. Meanwhile, advances have been made in component technology including auditory modeling, acoustic phonetic recognition, lexical representation, language modeling, and the implementation of algorithms in general‐ and special‐purpose hardware. The component technology is intended to provide robust performance in real time, and to support future expansion in task complexity. The program also resulted in the development of several large databases, and a set of common research tools. The use of these databases in conjunction with the development and implementation of standardized performance test procedures has permitted consistent documentation of progress. This talk will describe these technical areas in greater detail. [Work supported by DARPA‐ISTO.]