Comment Neural Networks were a distraction (Score 2) 24
In Speech Recognition and Text-To-Speech neural networks were the diregeur fashion, a long with lisp. But in the end it was Hidden Markov Models, and even Baysean modelling that ended up solving these AI-ish ventures.
Neural Networks influenced a great deal of collateral and tangential research, the the Neural Networks themselves really went no where. They just weren't usable, not even for machine learning -- at least not in the "pure form".