Eliza Corporation was founded in 1984 to further the R&D efforts of the speech and pattern recognition group at the California Institute of Technology. This group, lead by Eliza's founder, Dr. John Kroeker, focused on understanding the ways that the human brain processes acoustic and visual data. Specifically, Dr. Kroeker led the development of a branch of specialized, non-linear mathematics required to model how the human inner ear and brain process acoustic data (such as speech).

Eliza pioneered the early, groundbreaking research in learning algorithms and their use in optimizing speech recognition technology. Early on, researchers at Eliza realized that the essential problem to be solved was how humans actually recognize a phoneme – the fundamental element of all human speech. They then developed techniques for automating the improvement or "training" of their recognition algorithms – using phoneme, word, and phrase level data from actual healthcare conversations. Then, Eliza pioneered the use of web-based development and testing tools to provide the most rapid and flexible application development environment possible for this technology.

These breakthroughs, together with exponential improvements in the performance of computer processing power, allow Eliza to deliver customized, truly interactive speech applications on a highly flexible and cost-effective platform.

And we haven't looked back since. We signed our first customer in early 2000, and have been hosting high volume, production speech recognition applications exclusively in healthcare over the past six years.