PlainTalk is the collective name for several speech synthesis
(MacinTalk) and speech recognition technologies developed by Apple
Inc. In 1990, Apple invested a lot of work and money in speech
recognition technology, hiring many researchers in the field. The
result was "PlainTalk", released with the AV models in the Macintosh
Quadra series from 1993. It was made a standard system component in
System 7.1.2, and has since been shipped on all PowerPC and some
other 68K Macintoshes.