After the meeting, Adams delicately told Hart and Lindsay that their goals were unrealistic. Most experts believed that true “far-field speech recognition”—comprehending speech from up to thirty-two feet away, often amid crosstalk and background noise—was beyond the realm of established computer science, since sound bounces off surfaces like walls and ceilings, producing echoes that confuse computers. The Amazon executives responded by channeling Bezos’s resolve. “They basically told me, ‘We don’t care. Hire more people. Take as long as it takes. Solve the problem,’ ” recalled Adams. “They
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