Apricot Portable

The Apricot Portable, released by British company ACT Ltd in November 1984, was the first portable computer with built-in speech recognition — and also the first with a 25-line LCD screen and an infrared wireless keyboard. The base model cost £1,695. A clip-on microphone attached to the front of the unit; users trained the machine by repeating each word aloud, and more repetitions improved accuracy. The vocabulary could reach 4,096 words, of which 64 were held in RAM at a time, and speech worked in two modes: dictation, where spoken words were transcribed into the word processor, and command mode, where a spoken term triggered an action.

ACT (Applied Computer Techniques), founded by Roger Foster and based in Birmingham, had made its name with small-business accounting computers before the Apricot line. The Portable was the third machine in the series and the first with the voice feature; it was followed in 1985 by the Apricot xi, which became the machine the company is best remembered for. The Portable itself was not a success — the voice recognition was a hard sell, the infrared keyboard could be broken by blocking the beam, and the British portable market was small.

The interaction model is the museum's point of interest: a portable computer whose primary novelty is an ear. The user speaks to it as a physical ritual — clip the microphone, repeat a word several times, test, repeat again. This is speaker-dependent recognition a year before DragonDictate's commercial launch, built into hardware rather than delivered as software.