RIPAC was a VLSI single-chip microprocessor designed for automatic recognition of the connected speech, one of the first of this use.
The microprocessor was presented in September 1986 at The Hague (Netherlands) at EUSPICO conference.
The name RIPAC is the acronym for "Riconoscimento del PArlato Connesso", that means "Recognition of the connected speech" in Italian.
The microprocessor was designed by the Italian companies CSELT and ELSAG and was produced by SGS: a combination of Hidden Markov Model and Dynamic Time Warping algorithms was used for processing speech signals.
It was able to do real-time speech recognition of Italian and many languages with a good affordability.