ITT A/CD is one of a few companies that has taken on the challenge of transferring speech technology from an abstract algorithm to a working system. In the mid‐1980s IIT A/CD developed moderate vocabulary, speaker‐dependent, connected speech recognition, and produced a series of single‐board recognizer products compatible with various personal computers and workstations. To date, over 400 single‐board recognizers have been ordered by over 30 customers. From these efforts a number of issues and experiences have surfaced that are critical to their successful operation. Some of these include: (1) robust performance across channels and microphones (every change to the microphone, analog recording setup, and room environment, will affect, and, most likely, lower performance); (2) training sensitivity (every shortcut taken in training, i.e., using fewer tokens, cross‐channel recordings, out‐of‐vocabulary training phrases, etc., will lower performance); (3) man‐machine interface (use psychologists to design user interfaces rather than engineers; otherwise they end up being just too complicated); (4) application specification (select only those applications that receive an overwhelming and compelling advantage from the technology).